On our last day in Siem Reap, we went off to a nearby silk farm. It was quite a lovely location, and the tour was super cool. I had no idea about the process of making silk, and the tour stepped us through every single step.The mulberry bushes. Apparently these are the leaves that silkworms like best.Silk worms! Busy chowing down.
The silky silk worm cocoons.The cocoons are added to hot water, to make extracting the silk possible. The first stage removes the coarser “raw” silk from the cocoon.Once the coarse outer “raw” silk is removed from the cocoons, they keep simmering away and the finer silk can be extracted.
A giant spindle attached to a multitude of smaller spindles.A selection of the natural dyes for colouring the silk.
These ladies were busy removing imperfections from the bundles of silk. It takes them about an hour per bunch.
Strands of silk are wrapped in nylon prior to dying (the nylon stops the dye from reaching that section), so that the silk can more easily be woven into a specific pattern.
This is incredibly impressive to see in action.It takes quite a while to do each piece, so throughout the factor there are half completed works, waiting for someone to come along and finish them.