What Is Silk Fabric

Silk fabric is widely known as the most luxurious and beautiful fabric in the world. This natural fabric is made from the larvae of the mulberry silkworm to construct their cocoons. It is also a generalized term for any fabric constructed using silk yarns or fibers.

Silk is renowned for its lustrous appearance, fine quality, beautiful drape and soft handle. It is a highly-priced fabric, mainly due to the time-consuming and delicate process involved to turn the thread into a yarn.

How Is It Manufactured

The commercial process of making silk fabric is complex and labour intensive.
Silk’s textile origins date back to 6000 BC China. Silk is made from a continuous filament fiber spun by silkworms. Silkworms lay their eggs on special paper and only eat fresh mulberry leaves. The freshly hatched larvae will eat 50,000 times their initial weight during this period.

35 days after hatching from their eggs, the silkworm is 10,000 times heavier than when it first hatched and is ready to begin the process of spinning its cocoon which takes about 3-8 days to make.After silkworm finished their cocoon, workers will collect the cocoon. Then we start the next stage. At this stage, the cocoon is treated with hot air, steam or boiling water. Silk is then unbound from the cocoon by softening the sericin (the natural gum coating) and then very carefully unwound. The sericin protects the silk, so it is left on until the silk is processed and sometimes until after it is woven.

Every cocoon can yield up to 1,000 yards of raw silk fabric thread. At the next stage, these thread will be spun to produce a yarn of silk.