So much for my ten-day silkworm challenge. In a ten-day album challenge it would have been like running out of energy on day four on the Bob Dylan side of The Concert for Bangladesh.

“It was raining from the first and I was dying there of thirst so I came in here.
And your long time curse hurts but what is worse is this pain in here.
I can’t stay in here.
Ain’t it clear?
That I just don’t fit.
I believe it’s time for us to quit.
When we meet again, introduced as friends, please don’t let on that you knew me when, I was hungry and it was your world.”

The presence of great art uplifts us. Everyone is poisoned and stabbed dead on the stage in the last scene of Hamlet.

While we are breathing deeper with straighter backs. 

The past few days have been so dismal. No wonder the silkworm eggs didn’t hatch.
I don’t blame them. 

“If I were an alien passing by earth I would lock the spaceship door.”

I found myself praying while that stinking pile of orange shit held up the Bible. “One big bolt of lightening please.” And let the Bible gently fall to the ground miraculously open to the Sermon on the Mount.”

Anyway… the silkworm eggs are hatching. 

Not all of them, so I will wait until tomorrow morning to start feeding them. 

They are pepper-sized little furry babies looking for some thinly sliced gourmet mulberry leaf, chilled to just below room temperature with some Bach Cello Suite playing softly in the background. 

They will take four breaks in their mulberry feast in the next 28 days. Their belts become too tight and they need to open it a few notches. (They actually shed their skins four times.) 

A feather is needed to gently round up the babies so they don’t get buried beneath the sliced mulberry and suffocate or wander off to a place where they can’t find any mulberry leaf. 

They may dislike the interference from a higher authority. 

Some of them may hold resentment. Most of them just want to get on with the business of eating. I haven’t witnessed any antifa, silkworm identity issues, victim mentality amongst the silkworms on my trays.

Perhaps because I use a beautiful pheasant feather and not a brutal finger to keep them from hurting themselves. 

The beauty in the woodblock print gently brushes the new born silkworms onto paper where they can be taken care of. Note the Japanese honeysuckle blooming in the background. The first silkworm eggs hatch when the honey suckle starts to bloom I noticed years ago. 

I’ll stop the Animal Farm stuff now. I know where it leads.

A boiling pot of water.

Hee hee hee…(evil laughter.)

And I am the bourgeois puppet master...after some bourgeois silk to satisfy my melancholic appetite for long tedious processes at the expense of sentient creatures.

Day 3 of the silkworm challenge.
Three videos on this post. Watch them and change your life.
The silkworm eggs didn't hatch today...oh oh. This is getting tedious.
I asked Minako, the old woman who taught me about silk farming and weaving and dyeing many years ago. ‘Why is that silk thread rough and that silk thread smooth?’
She replied, ‘ One is reeled and one is spun.’
Meaning that one type of thread is made when you unravel the cocoon and the other is made when you make a fluffy floss and spin it.
Today I will write briefly about spinning silk.
Yeah…
The silkworms eat for 28 days and then the liquid in their guts is spat out forming a cocoon around them. The thread they spit out is held together with a sticky substance. This makes the cocoon firm. This glue melts in alkaline and washes away and leaves just the fibers.
Think of too much starch on a shirt and you wash it in the hot cycle and the shirt softens up.
The soft de-gummed silk is shiny and soft. The silk with the natural starch left in is more subtle and lustrous and stiff. This is silk literacy 101.
Minako needed an alkaline. She bundled together a handful of straw and lit it on fire. She took the cup of black ashes and put it in boiling water. She wrapped up 50 cocoons in a piece of cheesecloth and boiled it for an hour. The alkaline from the ashes melted the starch in the cocoons and they collapsed into flat wet fluff. (With gross silkworm gunk still in the collapsed middle of the mess.)
There are chrysalis inside the cocoon. It is the stage between the silkworm and the moth. These are picked out and the silk cocoons stretched out on a wooden frame into silk hankies.
The hankies are dried then stretched open and then spun.
Here is my spinning machine. It is not that noisy. The iPhone just picks up the sound too well. I am spinning the floss into thread. I will later use barks or leaves or roots etc to dye the silk thread.
In the old day the b-grade silk cocoons were spun into thread and the higher grade were reeled into finer silk thread. I actually prefer the rougher spun stuff. It has more warmth and character.
I could write a book on spinning silk alone.
I could write a book on removing the starch.
I could write a book on reeling silk.
I am not going to.
I should have been writing and documenting this stuff for the last 25 years. It is too late to start.
Damn.
I have boxes and boxes of silk thread and yarn upstairs. I will never use it all in this life unless I start now and weave some big stuff. Just look what I dug out yesterday. I made this thread over 15 years ago. I got around to degumming it today…. Jesus. Those greens were gorgeous yesterday. I may dye this silk and weave some green blankets.
Thank you Covid for making me face up to my evil ways.