Silk has a history of thousands of years, so what is the traditional silk-making method?

For thousands of years, silk has been synonymous with luxury goods. It is hard to believe that this comfortable fabric comes from silkworms.

First, a female silkworm will die when she lays 400 eggs at a time, and each egg hatches a larva every two weeks or so. The larvae will continue to eat fresh mulberry leaves, and their weight will increase to 654.38+00000 times. Will enter the pupa segment of the residual insect, during which there will be liquid secreted by salivary glands. When liquid comes into contact with air, it will evolve into monofilaments, and larvae will wrap themselves in monofilaments. In order to get filariasis, it is necessary to ensure that monofilaments are not damaged or cut off. Boil the alkali for about three minutes to kill the larvae that will become moths, and the protein containing sericin will melt after heating, which will make the raw silk easier to untie.

Second, if you want to collect silk, at least 30 to 50 alkali should be used at a time, and all of it should be sent to the manual winding wheel through a hole in the bamboo stick. Then slowly and carefully turn the scroll to untie the scissors. When the thread passes through the stick, the residual sericin binds them together to form a thick thread. The silk thread is very thin, the diameter is only about 1% mm, so two are needed. It takes 1000 to 3000 scissors to produce about 450 silk threads. Cutting is a time-consuming process, because a silk thread can be as long as nine professional football fields. In order to make this feather-like silk thread easier to handle, it will be weighted with sand before sweeping, and then the sand and residual sericin will be washed away.

Thirdly, synthetic dyes can be absorbed uniformly during bleaching silk thread. The ratio of dye to hot water, water temperature and soaking time are all very important for dyeing, because all these factors affect the quality of dyeing. After washing off the excess dye with warm water, hang the silk thread to dry. Put a bunch of dry dyeing silk thread on a big machine, then transfer it to a smaller roller and then transfer it to a small spool on an automatic machine. In order to make the branch, the manufacturer puts the horizontal conveying spool between the vertical lines of the traditional manual straightener, and another machine winds it on the spool at the same time.

Fourth, workers put a certain number of spools on the machine, which makes their machines aim at plants about three feet wide vertically and parallel to each other. Usually 4000 vertical lines are needed. The weaver's feet step on the pedal of the loom, keep the spool horizontal, and weave the wound thread and vertical line into cloth. In order to make different textures, weavers use different colors. There are thick and textured silk threads and some patterned silks and satins. The industry is very complicated. Even the most experienced weavers can only weave two to six inches of cloth every day. This is the whole process of silk weaving.