Thai silk manufacturing process: from silkworms to silk fabric

Thai silk, like any other silk in the world is made from the cocoons of silkworms. Silkworms are the caterpillars or larva of the domesticated silk moth (Bombyx mori, family Bombycidae).

Silkworms eating mulberry leaves
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Cocoons containing silk
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The production of Thai silk begins by raising silkworms on a steady diet of white mulberry leaves (Morus alba). This process is known as sericulture. For the first month the silk worms feed on mulberry leaves. Only after the whole month of growing the caterpillars form the cocoon containing the silk.

Spindle: winding silk thread
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At this stage the cocoon is taken from the mulberry plant and boiled, to separate the silk thread from the silk worm. Since a single thread of silk from the cocoon is too thin to be used alone, Thai weavers combine more threads to obtain silk thread for handmade weaving. To do this silk weavers hand-reel the threads onto a wooden spindle to produce a uniform strand of raw silk. The process is very labor intensive, as it takes nearly 30 hours to produce a 0.5 kg (around 1 pound) of Thai silk. Did you know that a single cocoon can produce up to 1.5 km (almost 1 mile) of silk thread!

Silk Dying
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Natural Thai silk can have a variety of colors, ranging from yellow to green. Even though most of the time light golden is characteristic of the region. The next step is to dye the silk thread. In the past, the only dye used was from aniline plants which made the fabrics blue. Today many chemical dyes are used and more colors are possible. silkClick.com offers a wide range of silk products, both chemically and naturally dyed (check out our product section).

One of the most unique characteristics of Thai silk is the color variation depending on the angle you look at silk fabric from. This shimmering appearance is given by the triangular prism-like structure of the silk fiber which allows Thai silk fabric to refract incoming light at different angles thus producing different colors.

Loom: silk weaving
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Thai silk fabric is then produced with a bamboo loom. The techniques vary depending on the type of silk that is being produced. For instance, plain weave is the simplest method of weaving; the weft thread passes over and under each ward thread, then under and over on the following line.

And from here beautiful Thai silk fabric travels directly to our on-line store, with excellent quality at affordable prices.