How 3 Expensive Silks Are Made

Craftspeople in southern Asia extract silk from lotus flowers, silkworms, and muga cocoons.   Each process is different, but extracting the fibers requires perfect conditions and a watchful eye. These practices have been passed down for generations, and some are thousands of years old.

The following is a transcript of the video. Narrator: Lotus flowers, worms, and muga moths are the unlikely source of one of the most delicate and luxurious fibers in the world: silk. Known for its unique sheen and luster, silk has been regarded as the “queen of fibers” for thousands of years.

At $80 per yard, its extraction process is painstaking and costly. Here’s how craftspeople across the southern part of Asia extract and process the delicate fibers from silkworms, lotus flowers, and muga cocoons. We begin with these wiggly little silkworms in Nam Cao, Vietnam.

They’re responsible for spinning each of these tiny cocoons. Just one of them can hold almost 1,000 feet of silk. Here, craftspeople produce silk in a tedious 30-step process.

It all starts in fields like this one, where the worms’ food is harvested. Silkworms only eat mulberry leaves. They contain vitamins, amino acids, and enough moisture that the worms never need to drink water.

Farmers bring loads of harvested leaves to the silkworm houses, where tens of thousands of silkworms are raised on big bamboo mats. The worms need over 600 pounds of leaves a day, and they’re fed every four hours. If they don’t eat this much, they’ll produce less silk that’s also lower quality.

The worms also need a sterile environment at a perfect temperature of around 22 degrees Celsius, or they’ll die. After nearly a month of eating and sleeping, their bodies will plump up. When golden silk starts to appear, the farmers will transfer the worms to another facility and hang them on racks stuffed with straw.

Here, they can spin their cocoons. The worms spit the silk out of this organ, called a spinneret. Within two days, the cocoons are ready.

Workers remove each one by hand. Once they’ve got a big enough pile, they boil the cocoons in water. That way, they can kill the pupae inside and either eat them or use them in traditional medicine.

They soak the cocoons for up to seven hours to soften the threads before pulling them. This machine reels the silk. Workers then hang the threads to dry.

Next, the threads are machine-woven. And, finally, the silk gets dunked 100 times in all-natural dyes. This technique is the same one that’s been used for generations.

Today, these silk farmers produce over 2,200 pounds of silk per year. Lotus silk is one of the rarest fibers in the world, only extracted by a few craftspeople across Vietnam, Cambodia, and Myanmar. Extracting enough lotus silk for one scarf can take two months, and the final product can cost 10 times as much as regular silk.

The fiber is paler, softer, and stretchier than the bright yellow silk that worms produce. Unlike worm silk, each thread of lotus silk starts with the stem of the lotus flower, and every single thread must be extracted by hand. Each stem contains a minuscule amount of thin stick fibers, which must be rolled together and dried.

The threads need to be processed within 24 hours, while they’re still wet; otherwise, they’ll break. The plants are only available to harvest between April and October, so harvesting has to be done daily. Once dry, these threads are carefully weighed down and delicately hand-spooled.

Then they’re put into the loom. The fibers are much more fragile than worm silk, so they can only be hand-woven, and this requires multiple steps. Once woven, the material is as soft and durable as traditional silk, breathable as linen, and slightly elastic.

A 25-centimeter scarf can sell for just over $200. In Assam, a state in northeastern India, muga silk is as valuable to the culture as gold. To make these lustrous golden strands, laborers must unwind a muga caterpillar’s cocoon into a single, long, seamless thread.

And to make just one sari, about 1,000 cocoons need to be unraveled. A sari made of muga silk can cost up to $6,500, thousands more than other saris. The silk can last up to 100 years and is said to offer protection by absorbing 85% of harmful UV rays.

Extracting it involves a huge amount of manual labor. It all starts with two moths: a male and a female. Rearers pick a pair to mate and tie the female to a khorika, a stick with a hook made of thatch grass or twine.

This is where the female will lay her eggs. Rearers then transfer the khorika to a som tree, where larvae will hatch and begin to feed on the leaves. Larvae are vulnerable at this stage, so farmers need to keep a watchful eye.

They shoot clay pellets into the fields to keep potential predators at bay. After one or two months, they can collect the mature caterpillars. They put muga silkworms into jalis, structures made by tying together semidried leaves.

Here, the caterpillars rest and weave their cocoons for three days, until they fully empty their silk glands and enter pupation. Now it’s time for the weaving process. To produce 1 kilogram of muga yarn, a weaver needs 5,000 cocoons, which is enough for about five saris.

It’s tradition to add dried banana peel or paddy thatch ash to the mixture to give the thread a better sheen. The shinier the silk, the more valuable it will be. Two people then use a bhangoi to carefully reel the long muga silk threads in a continuous motion.

Reelers gently pull from several cocoons and join the thin strings together to make one thicker thread. They must make sure each thread has a consistent thickness, or the yarn won’t be as valuable. Finally, the rearers load the muga silk yarn into the bamboo looms, where Assamese women weave it into the desired fabric.

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