Claire Dean
@clairedean
Writer, maker & conservator. Short stories, zines, book arts. Used to be an academic, retrained in conservation. Repairs & cares for old manuscripts, maps, plans, photographs & the curious objects that end up in archives. 📍Lancashire, North of England
Loved Christa Gattringer's practical workshop on making her K2 book covers at #ARA2026. I accidentally left two bits unfolded in my first attempt but I quite like the fact the book ended up with wings!
Today, I feel like I achieved peak conservator-conferencing by using a handy free nail kit (thank you Ancestry exhibition stand) in a great workshop on remoistenable repair tissues by Lou Blackmore from TNA #ARA2026
Niche post, but this was such a satifying tear repair on fragile 100-year-old tracing paper at work today (remoistenable microfibrillated cellulose film with gelatine - it will be pretty much invisible from the front) #conservation
My friends' daughter made me this lego Claire and I think she captured me perfectly ❤️. I had no idea you could get lego heads with hearing aids!!
Very excited to have made it onto the letters page of this week's New Statesman. I think this means I'm a proper grown up now! #MorecambeBay
A bit of boat washed up on the beach in Morecambe yesterday carring barnacles. If you look very closely, you can see it has also become a kind of photograph of seaweeds over time. #MorecambeBay #AlternativePhotography
Finding it quite hard to readjust to normal life after a wonderful scholarship week living and writing in a library @gladlib.bsky.social
Peepshows, paper theatres and zoetropes at the Bowes Museum (got to introduce my 19-year-old to some lovely old plastic View-Masters too!)
First commute of 2026 (miraculously there are still trains to Barrow today despite them seemingly going nowhere else!) #MorecambeBay
It was an absolute joy to be at the launch of Myriam Frey's (@dustynewrose.bsky.social 's) first collection, 'The Building Inspector', published by the indomitable @nightjarpress.bsky.social
Glad to hear they're letting you WFH! This was me in one of the buildings I work in a fortnight ago 😂. When I retrained, I didn't realise saving old paper things was going to be so full of adventure!
At my dayjob in an archive today, workmen started bringing me the retro rubbish they found in the loft, including a 1960s fag packet and a 1990s coke can. There was also a 1980s page 3 (not pictured 😂)
Drawing the seaweed pools on Hest Bank Wharf at today's #MorecambeBaySketchClub
Moved my eldest for university yesterday. He's still in the north but right across at the other side 😭
This is a bit exciting :) Tickets available here: www.brasseriezedel.com/events/wordt...
Sometimes my dayjob brings niche excitements, like how ridiculously happy I was to get a reduction in rat wee staining with minimal moisture migration using low cost, cut-to-size gellan gum gel yesterday.
Sketched the lovely cool, still-damp seaweed today at #MorecambeBaySketchClub