The Fiberholic's GUIDE TO SILK

It is often said when working with fiber, whether unspun or as yarn, that there are no "right" or "wrong" ways, only the ways that will satisfy our creative objectives. I believe this is largely true, and since much of what we learn about fiber is what we have taught ourselves through our own experience, it is also true that we frequently devise techniques that are innovative and unusual.

What I present to you here is, admittedly, my slightly biased view of working with silk. If you have experience with silk, this may not always square with approaches you have heard or read about elsewhere, or with methods you have developed yourself.

It is not my intention to convert you to my way of thinking but you may find things in these pages that you can adapt to your own techniques. If you are trying silk for the first time, I will introduce you to this luxurious fiber and give you easy to follow methods for using it with exciting results.

INTRODUCTION

I'm not going to ask you to sit through a history lesson, but it might help you to appreciate silk in a new way if you know a little about its background.

Legend has it that 5,000 years ago the Chinese empress Hsi-Ling discovered silk when she dropped a cocoon into her tea and unraveled the filaments into fine strands of silk.

Although this is probably not a true story, it is a lovely mental image and the legend persists. It is known that the discovery of silk may have been as long ago as 6,000 years. Silk was first reserved exclusively for the use of Chinese emperors and its cultivation was kept a deep secret under penalty of death for centuries. By 300 BC Chinese silk fabric was being traded throughout Asia and to the west. These trade routes were known as the "Silk Roads". The Chinese maintained their monopoly on silk culture until the sixth century when a Roman emperor sent two monks to China to smuggle silkworm eggs in their hollow walking staffs.

Gradually knowledge and use of silk spread and it became almost a currency in itself, being used as payment to farmers, soldiers and civil servants. Lengths of silk replaced pounds of gold as payment. Silk became a valuable trading commodity and evidence of it was found as far away as Egypt where a mummy dated at 1070 BC wore silk for his journey to the afterlife.

One of the oldest textile materials known to man, silk was the first "industrial" fiber when silk reeling became mechanized in the fourteenth century.

Now here we are, many centuries later, holding this beautiful and prized fiber in our own hands. Let's get started.