SCORPION

Silk is one of the most expensive and prized materials in the world, with a history stretching back thousands of years, but how is this wonderful material made?

Silk is produced by domestic silkworms, which like our caterpillars; go through a stage of metamorphoses before turning into a butterfly or moth. Silkworms make a cocoon, a protective housing which protects them while they form into a moth. However these cocoons are made of a single silk thread, anything up to a mile long.

Commercially, silk worms are raised in the springtime to coincide with the arrival of their main food source, the mulberry bush. As soon as the mulberry bushes start to show their leaves, the silkworm eggs are incubated and once hatch, are fed on mulberry leaves for around a month and are left to form their silky cocoons.

The cocoons are then collected and the worms inside killed in order to prevent the thread from being broken. These cocoons are then soaked in warm water, the end is found and the single thread is combines with others on a real to form a thread that is thick enough to be used in clothing production. The threads extracted from the cocoons can be coloured differently due to chemicals that are produced by the worm, so the threads are boiled until they are completely white. Once the strands from 5 or so silk strands are twisted together to make a thread, the threads are then twisted into skeins. This process sued to be done by hand, but now machinery has automated much of the process.

The skeins of silk can then be used to make clothing- they are often coloured at this stage to produce the coloured silks that are particularly popular in fine clothing. The difficulty of producing silk has meant that it is an expensive and prized material to this day, but that is nothing compared to how expensive it was thousands of years ago. Silk had to be transported from China to Europe, so it was incredibly expensive to buy. It was only in about AD 550 when monks took China's silk production secrets to Europe that Europe started to produce its own silk, though it was still very expensive. The lure of silk remained strong throughout history, as James I of England decided to plant thousands of black mulberry trees to create a silk industry in England- unfortunately he needed white mulberry trees so the project failed.

To this day silk is still considered to be one of the best quality materials to be used in clothing. For example silk is considered to be the most expensive and high quality material to be used in silk bow ties, as well as a huge range of clothing for women. White silk is still very popular for wedding clothing, particularly for bow ties for men as it is very soft and its thin fibres are very good at catching the light, making it look absolutely beautiful in a well-lit environment.