In the town of Siem Reap, an organization called Artisans d’Angkor provides employment for rural people by teaching them ancient handicrafts. This organization also runs a silk farm in a more remote area. It was a bit off the beaten tourist trail, and we had to ask our guide to bring us there. Thank heavens, no crowds!
The silk farm grows its own mulberry trees and raises its own silkworms. Not nearly enough to supply the large quantities of silk they need for their weaving operations (the rest comes from China), but the worm-growing part of the business still seemed young, as were the trees. It was a beginning.
Silk worms are entirely domesticated animals, no longer found in the wild. They grow fast and are voracious eaters that must be fed frequently. They live only about four weeks before beginning to spin their cocoons. When the cocoons are completed, all but a few (kept for breeding) are harvested and boiled to remove the sericin coating that holds the cocoon together and also, alas, to kill the forming moth within, which would otherwise secrete an acid that would damage the silk thread.
Each cocoon is made of a single silk filament more than half a mile long. The worker finds the ends of several cocoons (if you look hard you may be able to see the fine filaments leading to the tool in the worker’s hand above) and inserts them into a machine that unwinds them from the cocoon. It winds several filaments together into a thread on a reel. The threads are then wound onto bobbins.
Some of the thread is bleached into “fine” silk, and some is left its natural color as “raw” silk. The silk is then colored using dyes made from a variety of natural ingredients.
More detailed descriptions of the life of the silkworm (Bombyx mori) can be found here and here.
The finished, dyed silk is then woven using hand-operated looms.
