The Silk Farm

TRACIE ... On our last day in Siem Reap we visited the Silk Farm. Apart from being impressed with the Farm itself (beautifully landscaped grounds, clean, modern facilities) and the tour that we were taken on (each person or family group etc gets their own tour guide who speaks very reasonable english), the process of growing silk was unknown to us, and was incredibly fascinating.

The silk moths mate (they have to separate them after three hours or else they will mate to the death!). The male dies after a couple of days, and the female lays a bunch of eggs, and dies sortly afterwards also.
The eggs hatch, and the silk worm eats mulberry leaves for something like a couple of weeks. They used to put the worms on the mulberry trees but now they bring the leaves to the worms. The worm, eats and eats until it goes yellow and fat!
When it's ready to go into the coccoon stage they are placed on large flat woven plate looking things, which the worms attach themselves to and begin spinning their coccoon, from their mouths. The thread is mostly continuous, and is up to 300 metres long when unravelled. The coccoons are yellow, with the female coccoons being fatter (they have weight problems too!).
20% of the coccoon's are allowed to hatch into moths to continue the next cycle, and the rest are placed in boiling water. This seemed mean, but they were only going to live three days anyway eh!
The first lot of water is 60 degrees, and then about eight coccoons are spun together to make around 200 metres of raw silk. If the moth was allowed to come out of the coccoon, all the threads would be cut in the process , making it impossible to make continuous thread. The next lot of water is 80 degrees, and the thread is much finer - about 100 metres of thread is harvested from this part.
At this stage, you can eat a cooked silk worm, which of course Jono did. He said it tasted like corn. Speaking of eating weird things, Jono tried snake in Siem Reap also. Now Jono can cook fish and snake - he BBQ'd his own dinner - very cool.
The silk yarn is then dyed. Many of the dye colours are natural. Banana leaves, raisins, bark, rusty nails!
The weaving process was just as amazing. Mostly women, are trained for about 12+ months before becoming an artisan. Plain silk is made at a rate of three metres per day. Patterned or multicoloured silk is 60 cm per day. 60 CM!!! The finished product was absolutely beautiful.

This was such interesting thing to learn about. I was absolutely enthralled for the whole thing.