Re: Cotton padding

[Christian Folini]

On Mon, Oct 04, 2004 at 05:05:21PM +0200, Ivo Malz wrote:
> > 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. 

What do you consider as "too short" when talking about cotton?

It is known, that short sheep wool produces bad quality cloth.
You get short sheep wool, when you shear the sheep before you bring
it to the butcher during Summer and the shearing has been a couple of
week ago. I've heard at University in one of the more interesting
lectures, that you could spin 8mm fibres. This would be woven into
cheap grey cloth.

Linnen and hemp fibres are good when they are very long. The
processing of the plants involves selecting the long fibres. Naturally
you end of with cheap dump you can use for filling and padding.

Now you do not shear cotton plants and i do not know if there is
need to select long fibres. They all look the same to me.
The fibres are simply collected during the harvest. I do not understand 
how they could possibly be too short. Are they dumped during the spinning or
shearing of the cloth after being woven (Fustian Linnen is known to
be sheared after production)?

It might be interesting to know, that the collection of old (linnen?) 
garments was an interesting business in order to get the base for
the growing paper industry of the 14th and 15th century (and beyond).
In the said lecture at university i've been told that they literally
fought over the monopoly to collect old garments in Florence...
E si non e vero ...

best regards,

Christian

-- 
When i am studying nature, i am not interested in miracles.
--- Albertus Magnus, De Generatione et Corruptione, 13th century.