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.