In The Afternoon We Chose To Visit The Silk Farm

although not on our itinerary,

we paid $25 for fuel as this was an extra excursion,

the good news for Steve, if he was here and myself, the place was a mass of bamboos which we both like,

when I first looked at this specie many years ago,

I at first thought someone had drawn the green line on the stems using a green felt tipped marker pen!

there were more as we walked into the first of the buildings,

these ones without the green stripe,

looking nice in the shade and sun,

there were stands of bamboo everywhere,

this stand with a new growth,

more in the distance, green stems here,

and almost a forest of yellow stems,

but back to the silk farm,

this is the statement from the farm, to train local people skills in the production of, in this case silk with more than 1,000 people being trained

as we moved to the next room we were greeted by some Buddha bamboo,

called Buddha bamboo because the stems look like the round belly of a Buddha,

on to the silk worms, mulberry leaves are the silk worms diet, they are grown in fields near the farm,

the plants or I should say trees are form the Himalayas, China and India to name few countries it is found in, the different plants are cross pollinated and clipped to keep the trees small so that the leaves can be easily collected,

 

now this is important, any part of the building that is used for growing the silkworms must have no direct contact to the ground, water is kept in small reservoirs to stop the dreaded enemy getting to the silkworms, ants,

 

our guide then explained the life cycle of the silk worm, from birth to death just 47 days,

a pair of silk moths mating, it can last as long as 12 hours, the male then dies,

the eggs are then laid, after which the female dies,

 the caterpillars grow then spin a cocoon, like these, 

normally the sp[ine their cocoon in a frame like this, although twigs are sometimes used,

the cocoons waiting to be collected,

the the young caterpillars hatch out and begin eating and growing,

Diana was absolutely fascinated by all of this,

the chart says it all,

in the next room the silk worms are getting bigger,

a lot bigger, some about three inches long,

these are some of the twigs that are used for,the silkworms to make their cocoons in,

so many worms, so many dresses in the making!

then on to the next building,

but going past this stand of bamboo I noticed something interesting,

many bamboos only flower at intervals as long as 65 or 120 years apart, producing seeds, so I was more than happy to find that here was a bamboo in flower and producing seeds, a rare event indeed,

 

on to the next workshop,

the cocoons are harvested,

and placed in hot water,

a series of individual threads are lifted from the water,

and placed round a spool,

the thread is collected around a drum where it then dries,

as the spool is unwrapped,

it is examined for small pieces of material that may have contaminated it,

these are removed before the next process,

the silk thread is then rewound,

until it looks like this,

almost like human hair,

it is now ready to be bleached,

it was at this stage of the process I actually felt the material,


it was as they say, as smooth as silk,

which was then wound on to bobbins,

this machine making light work of what was once a very labour intensive process,

our guide was a fountain of information as to where in the process of making silk we were,

the silk was then collected on this huge drum,

multiple strands of silk making up the thread,

a single thread of silk was taken from all of these spindles at the same time,

so fine you could hardly see them,

each turn of the drum adding to the length of silk available,

on the other side of the room a similar process was taking place,

but this time with black silk, which strangely enough was more difficult to see than the red,

but the process was subtly different,

in this case the drum was turned by hand rather than by an electric motor,

this one was foot powered,

the business end of the machine,

these are all natural dyes,

the silk now bleached is ready to be dyed,

the downside is that natural dyes do not have the strength of colour and silky sheen that synthetic dyes do.