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| The Mulberry Plantation |
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| A sheet of silk worm eggs--they'll take about 9 days to hatch into worms. |
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| Silk worms feeding on mulberry leaves for 3 - 4 weeks |
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| When the worms are ready to start spinning their cocoons, they're removed from the leaves. |
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| The fat wriggling caterpillars are sprinkled into rattan trays and then covered with netting. |
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| Starting to spin their cocoons |
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| These cocoons are just about ready for the bath... |
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| A full tray of cocoons--this took from 2 - 7 days. |
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| The cocoons are dropped into simmering water, and the seracin (the gummy yellow substance) softens. |
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| The fibres from several cocoons are "reeled" into a single thread. |
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| The moths inside the cocoons were cooked by the boiling water--the women snacked on these. We were offered them as a treat but we declined! I wished I had been brave enough... |
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| This was the only man working in the process--he was creating skeins of "raw silk" from the dry fibre created above. |
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| Skeins of raw silk--still full of seracin...very stiff and coarse. |
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| Our guide in the village--the leader of the silk workers--at work on her loom. |
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| The warp is pink and the weft has been dyed both pink and grey. She adjusts the weft to get the undulating pattern |
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| I bought this scarf--very similar to what she was weaving above. |
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| Our driver's wife was also a weaver in the "Mudmee" tradition which is where the weft threads are tied and dyed. |
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| Her dye studio |
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| At our driver's home--a traditional Thai house on stilts which is nice and breezy. I was using his broadband internet connection. |
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