Where does silk come from and how is it made?
Silk comes from silkworm cocoons; it’s not something that is made from the worms themselves. The Chinese perfected the art of growing silkworms and producing silk material over 4000 years ago. Growing silkworms and harvesting their cocoons is an extremely labor-intensive and tricky process. It takes approximately 3,000 silkworms to produce 1 pound of raw silk after they have consumed over 200 pounds of Mulberry leaves! A single silk filament from a silkworm cocoon can be over a mile long although they are usually half that length. Between 5 and 8 of these filaments are twisted together to make a single thread. The eggs of silkworms are kept at 65 degrees Fahrenheit and gradually the temperature is increased to 77 degrees at which time the worms hatch. The worms are fed every half hour around the clock on a diet of chopped mulberry leaves and after a month, the silkworms have grown to 10,000 times their original size and begin to spin their cocoon. It takes a silkworm three or four days
