How Does Silk Is Produce

Silk material is expensive and was considered a luxury for some people. But it is worth buying silk than other kind of material, because silk has many health benefits and one of them is that it is hypoallergenic. It is also known to be the strongest natural material you can get and the most beautiful textile fabric. But you may wonder how does silk was made. The process of make this wonderful textile material is very delicate and needs to be taken seriously and carefully, which makes it expensive. To produce silk, we need silk worm. The cocoon of the silk worm should be handled and processed carefully to make it silk fabric.

After getting the cocoons, it will go through four stages of processing. The stages in specific order are sorting cocoons, softening the sericin, reeling the filament, and bailing.

Sorting the cocoons is the first stage in producing silk. There are categorizations in sorting cocoons to determine the quality of silk to be made. They are sorted by their sizes, textures, colors, and shape. The color of the cocoons will vary from yellow to gray.

Next stage is the softening of the sericin. Sericin holds the two strands of natural silk together which make the silk doubled. It is a gelatinous organic compound. This organic compound must be softened to allow the unwinding of the filament as one continuous thread.

Reeling the filament is the process of making a thread of raw silk. In order to get a thread of raw silk the filaments from the cocoon should be unwind and combined the silk together. And to produce the desired diameter of raw silk which is known as “reeled silk”, they need to reel three to ten strands at a time. For about 300 to 600 m which is the usable length of reeled filament.

The last stage is the bailing. This stage is the packing of silk that is made in a small bundle called books. These books weigh 2 to 4.5 kg after it was reeled into skeins. The books of silk will place into bales weighing about 60 kg. Then in this form, raw silk is now ready to be shipped to silk mills all over the world.