Silk Farming in Cambodia

There are so many things I want to share with everyone, it's hard to know where to begin.

First off, I visited 4 countries in Southeast Asia, Singapore, Bali (Indonesia), Cambodia and Thailand.  These places seem similar to me in many ways. In the way I imagine an Asian person might see similarities in different European countries.

To me, the food is similar and the traditional clothing and fabrics are basically the same. The main garment for men and women is a 2 or 3 yard length of fabric wrapped around the hips and tied and/or twisted to hold it in place with variations in each country.

And silk production is found in all Southeast Asia, well I guess I guess in Asia as a whole.  The silk worm, actually a caterpillar, is native to northern China. But, Cambodia is a special case because they are still recovering from the war in the 1970s that destroyed their country and economy. They have been working hard to reestablish traditional arts and manufacturing and the silk farm I visited is part of a special program doing this.

This is what I learned about how silk is produced.

These are silk worms.

The only food they will eat is the leaves of the mulberry bushes that are especially grown for them.

Here's one by it's self so you can see the size. I petted this guy! I thought he would be slimy, but was very soft and dry.

They spend the first 4 to 6 weeks of their life eating mulberry leaves like in the photo above. Then they begin to make a silk fiber and wrap it around themselves like these worms have begun to do.

Here is a bin of cocoons ready to be processed.

I learned that the outer part of the cocoon is what becomes raw silk and the inner part is the fine silk used for taffeta, chiffon, satin, etc.

The first job is to unwrap the silk fibers from the cocoons. Each cocoon has 300 to 900 meters of silk thread.

The cocoons are first put out into the sun to kill the caterpillar. Then into boiling water to loosen the thread. A wooden stick with a rough end is used to find the end of the silk on each cocoon. It is then wrapped onto a large spindle.

I was told that 80 percent of the cocoons are used to make silk and 20 percent are allowed to turn into moths to breed the next generation for silk making.  The silk moth and caterpillar have been domesticated for so long they can no longer live in the wild.  The adult moths aren't even able to fly.  They have big fat bodies with small wings.

The breed of silk worm in Cambodia makes yellow silk which has to be bleached first, then dyed.  I felt some of the silk before and after bleaching.  It is much softer after the yellow is bleached out of it.

Silk is being bleached in this pot.

Some kind of bark is being used to dye this silk a taupe color. You can see the dyed hanks hanging behind the worker.

Here is a bleached hank ready to be dyed.

This dyed silk is being wound onto spools.

This contraption transfers the silk in hank form onto smaller spools.

Now, honestly there was a bit of a language gap and I am a bit confused as to the order of things at this point.  All I can figure is somethings are done completely by hand and some times machinery is used like in the photo above.

The spinning is done by hand from all these fine fibers.  The machine they use is made from bicycle wheels.  I have a very short video below.

Click here to go to the website for this silk farm to learn about it's mission and see the other arts that are being fostered. 



I will talk about weaving in another installment.