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Silk Information

The silk industry originated in China.
Silk was highly valued in Asia Minor and the trade road to China became known as the Silk Road. Literally, silk became worth its weight in gold.

Sericulture (the craft of producing silk and its cloth) gradually spread through western Asia and Europe. By the 15th century, France and Italy were the leading manufacturers of silk in Europe. Due to religious persecution, large groups of skilled Flemish and French weavers fled to England and an industrial complex for silk weaving developed in Spitalfields in the1620s.

Silk has many properties which contribute to its reputation as a luxury fiber. It has a beautiful natural luster and will take dye readily. Almost as strong as cotton, it is more elastic than either cotton or linen. It will absorb up to one third of its own weight in water without feeling wet to the touch, and is a warm fabric despite its lightness. Producing silk is a complex and skilled operation which has taken centuries to refine.

The silkworm moth (Bombyx mori) has been domesticated for centuries, and the result is a creature which is bred and raised on farms, with wings too weak to fly and legs unable to crawl more than a foot or so. Silkworms are totally reliant on humans and thus a very labour-intensive prospect.

To transform the silkworm cocoons into cloth, they are boiled to release the sticky sericin on the outside. Next, since an individual silk thread is too fine to handle, the threads of as many as ten cocoons are wound together onto a reel, sticking together to form one long, strong thread. From then on, the silk can be treated as any ordinary fibre, either woven or knitted with the possibility of a wide range of textures and quality.

How to recognise silk.

There are four basic methods for determining true silk:
1) Consider the price
2) Look at the weave
3) Check the luster
4) Burning

1) Pure silk costs maybe 10 times as much as imitation silk.

2) Real silk weave is completely handmade and the filament is a natural fibre with clearly visible irregularities and joins in the thread along the warp and the weft. Imitation silk is a machine made fabric and has a perfect surface with no flaws or bumps.

3) Luster also shows whether a fabric is real or imitation. Pure silk is made with one colour for the warp and another for the weft. This produces the sheen and luster and creates the unique two tones and blends which change depending on the angle of light.

4) If you burn silk with a flame, it leaves fine ash and smells like burning hair. When you take the flame away it stops burning. If you burn imitation silk with a flame, it drips, burns with black smoke, and continues to burn after the flame is taken away.