250 words

Silk factory originated in China at least 5000 years ago, and became a coveted luxury. Silk thread is produced by silk worms when they make their cocoons. Sericulture or commercially breeding silk worms for silk production is practiced in several Asian countries.

From home goods to accessories and clothing there are few textiles as elegant and luxurious or as priced throughout the ages as silk. It’s hard to believe this beautiful fabric comes from worms. The female silk worm lays up to four hundred eggs in one shot, then promptly dies. Each egg about two weeks later hatches into a larva. The larva feeds on fresh mulberry leaves continuously increasing its body weight 10,000 folds, and growing to a length of about 3 inches. Then as it enters the pupa phase of its life cycle it excretes liquid raw silk from salivary gland in its mouth. When that liquid silk contacts with the air it hardens into a single thread. Pupating lava winds that thread around itself into a fit cozy cocoon. Normally the pupa inside becomes a moth and the cocoon breaks as it emerges. However, this severs the continuous silk thread. So to keep the silk intact they boil the cocoon for about three minutes to kill the pupa inside before it transforms into a moth.

Boiling the cocoons also make the wound thread easier to unravel, by melting away most of the sera sin– the gelatinous protein that binds it. To harvest the silk they take threads from thirty to fifty cocoons at a time. They feed them all together through a hole in the bamboo stick onto a hand operated reel. Then slowly and carefully they turn the reel unravelling the cocoons. As the thread passes together through the stick, the remaining sera sin glues them together forming a single thicker thread. The silk threads coming together are so fine; only about one one-hundredth of a millimeter in diameter, that it takes two to three thousand cocoons to produce a pound of silk thread. Unravelling cocoon is a time consuming process, because a single thread can be as long as nine professional soccer fields. To make this featherlike silk thread easier to handle they weigh it down with sand before rolling it into a bundle. Next they wash away the sand and remaining sera sin. Then bleach the thread so it will uniformly absorb the synthetic die. It’s critical to monitor the ratio of die to hot water as well as water temperature and soaking time. As all these factors combined affects the quality of the color. After rinsing away the excess die with lukewarm water they hang the thread to dry. They mount the bundles of dried died silk thread on a big machine which transfers them to smaller rollers. Those rollers then go on an automated machine which transfers the threads to small bobbins. To craft silk fabric weavers will pass bobbins of thread horizontally between vertical threads on a traditional hand operated loom. Another machine meanwhile winds threads around spools. The worker then installs a set number of school threads on a mechanism which aligns them vertically on the loom parallel to each other. Fabric fits about three feet wide typically requires 4000 vertical threads. By stepping on the loom’s foot pedal the weaver repeatedly raises every second vertical thread. And with a chug of a code, passes a shuttle containing a bobbin of thread horizontally in-between. This intertwining of horizontal and vertical threads weaves the silk fabric. To create a patters the weaver uses multiple shuttles containing threads of different colors, fitness and textures. Some patterns such as an intricate we’ve called brocade are so intricate that even the most experienced weavers produce just two to six inches of fabric per day. Now that’s wearable art.