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).
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.
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!
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.
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