Creating Silk
Silk clothing has been around for thousands of years. We’ve all heard about the Silk Road in China in any of our high school history classes, but the process of creating silk is even older than that.
The process of creating silk or sericulture has actually been around since the Neolithic Era, about 12,000 years ago. A lot longer than most of you probably thought. It was mainly done in China with the country having a monopoly on the market for about 1,000 years. After that, with the start of bartering and cross-border trade, there were new players like India, Thailand, and parts of Europe jumping in on creating silk too.?
A Guide to Simple Silk?
So, how did people make silk back in the day??
Step 1: Sericulture?
What this means is the production and rearing of silk from silkworms. You can find these little critters in mulberry trees which are mostly in Asia in areas like Eastern China, and surprisingly, North America. The worms love mulberry leaves too so that makes the process of gathering them a lot easier.?
Step 2: Thread Extraction
Once you have your silkworms and they’ve eaten their delicious leaves, they’ll start to create cocoons around themselves. At this point, people would put the cocoons in hot water to loosen the grip of the silk. This is to make sure that the silk threads stay together and are continuous. Once the cocoons are looser and flowing, you can now put the threads from the silkworms onto a reel.?
Step 3: Dying
In the past, people would bleach or dye the threads with things in their environment. You would be able to use charcoal to soak a bundle of threads to dye them dark gray or black. Or use raspberries to dye the threads pink or red.
Nowadays, manufacturers use bleach acid dyes or reactive dyes to get that color a lot quicker and to have more of a match with their visions. A lot of times, manufacturers don’t dye the threads until they're ready to make a piece.?
Usually, this is the last step on creating the silk for manufacturers. However, there are more steps that are optional depending on what the manufacturer wants to achieve. These next steps are spinning, weaving, and printing. If you wanted to keep it simple, you would skip these and move onto step four.
Step 4: Finishing?
In order to have the look that most shoppers want, silk needs to be finished. This means conditioning it with different chemical treatments to get the silky, sheen look silk is known to have.?
The Value and Usage of Silk
Today, the silk industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. The market cap, or value of the industry, is predicted to be around $5 billion dollars in the next five years. And silk is only about .2% of the global textile industry.
So why do people use silk products??
Silk can be used in things like:
… and so much more.?
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The Ethics of Silk Production?
Like any natural fiber, there are a few concerns people have.?
Animal Cruelty
As I mentioned before, traditional or organic silk-making practices required that the silkworms in their cocoons were put in hot water, most likely leading to their death. Because of that, groups like PETA had an issue with the process.
Solution? Peace Silk
Peace Silk is made without synthetic fertilizers, or any type of pesticide, making it a more ethical alternative. In this method, the silkworms are removed from their cocoons before being put into the water.?
In Conclusion
The process of making your favorite silk top has been around for so much longer than you might think! There are many different methods to making silk and they all have their pros and cons.?
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