Re: Cotton padding

["Ivo Malz"]

Hello.

> Christian's question about cotton seeds. My first reaction was  
> 'what an irevelant question' - My second (and more intelligent  
> reaction) was 'what an interesting point! I wish I had thought about it  
> - it could be useful when considering how the cotton stuffing was  
> processed. So please let's continue'.

I´d suspect the cotton stuffing of jacks, cushions and the like to be the
terminal use of waste materials that were too short- fibred for further
processing. 
Contemporary house insulations are made compressed hemp fibres- the leftover
short fibres from kemping the fibres in preparation to spinning only the
long ones, in short: Waste from the textile industry.
Other records mention rags to be used for the stuffing of padded
garments...so the assumption of cotton wool being rather "waste" (leftovers,
more like)put to another use than picked for this purpose exclusively seems
at least likely to me.
 
> STUFFING... I've examined helmet linings in private collections and  
> some arming caps, all 16th century[...]

Edge/Paddock in "Arms and Armour of the Medieval Knight" mention an extant
armet liner stuffed with dried grass, alongside a photo.
By the way, according to John Seymour, horse collars used to be padded with
rye straw.

Regards

Ivo

-- 
+++ GMX DSL Premiumtarife 3 Monate gratis* + WLAN-Router 0,- EUR* +++
Clevere DSL-Nutzer wechseln jetzt zu GMX: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/dsl