The science behind silk: How it’s made?

Ive got to visit the Tianhou Silk Factory as part of our city tour in Shanghai. I find its very interesting that they were very informative especially because they have all the real thing there for us to understand the process.

Like this for instance. We were ‘served’ with few pans of these silk worms upon our arrival for us to see and touch the real thing.

The natural protein raw material of silk fabric actually comes from the cocoon of the silkworm of the domestic silkworm or the scientific name Bombyx Mori. During the 3-8 days of it’s puping period, the silkworm will secretes the sticky liquid protein, twisting in figure-8 motion about 300,000 times to produce around 1km of filament.

This machine is used to untangle the filaments from every single cocoon. Every cocoon housed 2 worms (usually a pair male n female). The cocoons were boiled in hot water, to kill the worm inside as a living worm will destroy the cocoon when they finished. Personally i find this quite cruel to be honest......

Other than using the untangling machine, this alternative manual way were also practiced especially to make matress or duvet, to get the fluffy fabric.

Ive summarized the process into this sketch while listening to their explanation in our own language. Apparently the instructors there can speak all different languages depending on the audience and in case of our case, they speak in Indonesian language.

Each cocoon were boiled, removed the worm, and then spread and stretched to a spreader one by one, layer by layer to compose this;

This one here is a result of layering 70 cocoon. To make one quilt, they demonstrate and let us experience to further stretch the fabric.

Stretchh..

Strechhhhhhhhh....

..and strechhhhhhhhhhhhh...

And continue doing this up to 6000 layers, a 1kg quilt is done.

And its so fluffyy! 😜😜😜😜

They also have so many quilt cover designs to choose from with reasonable prices. :)