Reading through dans book. He mentions a test done against glued layered linen. And alan williams test against quited linen.

Ill accept that glued linen is at best uncommon and at worse completely nonexistant.

however what I wonder is. A lot of pwoplw have tried glued linen and it is agreed to be for lack of a better term. Rock solid. (Looking up close at the armour worn by the sydney ancients springs to mind immediately)

How does quilted vs glued stand up in terms of penetration resistance. Durabilityboth against sustained attack or against the elements?... is it also possible to quilt linen. Then glue it? Does the hardening by glue make it less effective somehow?

also im not sure I properly understood the definition of quilted textiles since. I keep thinking of quiting as in the way doonas are made l. With patches of cloth sewn together. And thats the image that pops into people heads when I describe that linen was quilted...

On a purely personal note, I'm not aware of a single 'period' glue suitable for glueing linen so it remains flexible that isn't moisture susceptible and made of something that smells pretty awful. So one shower and your army will be falling apart, sticky and stinky.

Some people might like that sort of thing but for me I'm with the quilters!

Very good analogy Dan. And look how well they work!

Well, for starters, there's no reason to consider how to glue linen or what to use, because there is simply no reason to suspect that it was ever done. So why waste the brain time?

And right, "quilted" is not "patchwork". For a quilted linen cuirass you just cut the whole shape of the cuirass out of one piece of linen, then do that 10 or 15 more times and stack up the layers. Quilting is just stitching that runs across the whole thing to hold all the layers together without shifting. There are garments in Greek artwork that are shaped like a sleeveless tunic and have multiple rows of zig-zag decoration. They are often worn over a regular tunic (chiton). I suspect these are layered linen, and that the zig-zags are quilting. There are also depictions of tube-and-yoke cuirasses that show vertical lines or a diagonal grid pattern, which could be quilting. Dan always points out that close-spaced vertical rows of quilting makes the completed item quite stiff, and that the protection seems to be better with more tightly-space quilting. I'm not sure the ancient Greeks did scientific tests along those lines (a battlefield is Darwinian, but hardly scientific!), so variations in quilting are no real surprise.

Oh, casein glue is made from milk, specifically milk protein, not actually from cheese. I think I used to know something about how it stands up to heat and wet, but I don't remember.... The modern casein/milk paints that many of us use for painting shields and such include lime, so they are more like colored white wash, and NOTHING will make that run once it has cured. (Including modern paint strippers!) There are other kinds of glue, hide glue for instance, but no, I don't think any ancient glues are impervious to heat and water. But like I said, why worry about it?

Matthew

A lot of people get the casein and cheese/lime glues muddled up. It all has milk as its source after all, casein has its etymological base in the latin for cheese and when making it from milk its a similar process to making cheese.

You can make glue from the casein in milk, and you can make it from cheese. 2 slightly different things but it all has a casein base.

The cheese/lime glue is awesome for various wooden applications and having studied many panel paintings and furniture from 13th cent on, its usually in better condition than the wood.

There, more brain power than needed. But it was never slapped on linen to make armour...

Thanks, Mark! A sticky situation, granted...

Matthew

And I suppose I 'waste brain time' because im peskily curious that way. :p

I suppose i should clarify that when I said you can make glue using milk I probably meant 'something sticky, but not that sticky'. I doubt you could make linen armour with it, even if that ever existed. It sticks to surfaces as a carrier for pigment so paint. Cheese/lime glue on the other hand is a fantastic glue for joinery.

If I were making linen armour (see comment above about it ever existing...) my choices would be starch based, like a flour and water paste, resin based, using many of the vegetable rums and resins you get in that region, or hoof and hide. None of those provide any resistance from moisture and in many cases would attract all sorts of interested parties. A garment made from linen and animal size glue would look like a huge tasty snack to most rodents.

You could waterproof and kind of pest proof it using a varnish which would be a turpentine and resin mix, then you would have a garment that was incredibly=bly stiff and inflexible.

So the practicalities of making such a garment don't really add up. Proud to be a quilter.....