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Originally Posted by knotty panda Silk: It's my understand you don't want spun silk as it's fragmented and easily breaks. You want silk which is unraveled from the cocoon. |
Precisely.
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Originally Posted by knotty panda I have NO idea who does that, but God bless them! |
It sounds hard but it isn't. My grandmother was the last in my family to spun and weave silk by hand and I've seen how things worked. She did not deal with spinning the broken cocoons. The secret is that the silk threads from cocoons unravel by themselves in boiling water - so what's left is fishing them and pulling slowly as the cocoons unravel in the heat. The result is a very long thread made of half a dozen cocoons unraveled together... if you do not over-heat them, or break the threads, that is. If you ignore the smell, it's fun. I still have silk woven by her and her mother - my great grandmother on my mother's side. One of the things I will probably regret forever is... being born too late to have caught these women young enough to teach me how to do these useless, delightful things.
