Silk farm

The world is my school today my classroom is, at a silk farm in Siem Reap, Cambodia.

How silk is made

Worms life cycle

Step 1: Mating

Step 2: egg laying

Step 3: Hatching

Step 4: Larvae Step 1 (the larvae is starting to grow)

Step 5: Larvae Step 2 (the larvae is getting bigger is is starting to turn yellow)

Step 6: Larvae Step 3 (the larvae doesn't change color but gains size)

Step 7: Larvae Step 4 (The larvae gets brighter yellow and a little bit bigger)

Step 8: Larvae Step 5 (The larvae is fully yellow and has reached the maximum size)

Step 9: Cocoon Gathering (making the silk cocoons)

Step 10: Cocoons are put in boiling water

Step 11: Boiling water makes the silk cocoons unravel.

Step 12: Some people eat the dead worm from inside the cocoon

Step 13: The rough silk is sent to be dyed and spun

Tip: The dye is natural and made from plants, tree bark and maybe some metals. For instance Purple is made from lavender and red is made from iron.

Step 14: Once dyed and spun the silk isn put into patterns by…

Step 15: A Tube with silk inside is called a shuttle

Step 16: This is put through other colored silks and depending on the pattern you want you will put this through .times before you would switch colors.

Step 17: The machine that holds all the colored silks is called a loom. This is handmade by all the silk weavers.

This process takes 4 days to make one scarf. It is so interesting how these days it takes 1/100 of the time that it would take with a handmade loom. How it takes less than 1 millisecond to switch the two warps around. You could probably make a rug with the modern loom in 1 hour.

That is how silk is made.

<3 World Rings Bell

P.S. If you want some really interesting information on this, you should look at this youtube website.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TyhDkd8Iabs