This is not how they showed us it's done.
I've not seen anything like this.
But it makes sense. This must be the predecessor to the unraveling method. The pajama filling is silk but is the woven cloth cotton or silk? Did she buy the finished woven cloth?
The question is asked, in the usual method, how they find the end of the silk to unravel it?
The pupae first use the strand to create a place in the twigs and begin spinning the web material from the outside to the inside.
So the end strand is discovered by pulling at the mess used to attach the cocoon to the twigs before the cocoon was spun.
That's my conclusion and I'm sticky wicket.
But these domesticated silkworm pupae and they got no twigs.
Many more videos on this subject.
There are all kind of things going on.
One time I watched Milton Friedman's Free To Choose t.v. show on PBS and he was explaining government support of textile industry in India vs Japan.
India supported home industry weaving to elevate private homes from poverty. The whole town would sign up for the plan. Every household had a simple wooden loom that allowed them to crank out colorful lightweight crude Madras cotton textiles.
No. Wait. No, I don't want one. They're ugly. I just thought I wanted one. I don't want no stupid rainbow shirt from India. I must have been high when I thought that.
I want a real shirt that's not made in a hut with a dirt floor and cobras slithering around all over the place and monkeys running in and out through the windows and elephants sticking their trunks in and sucking up all the bathwater and pooping outside in the dirt street.
The cameras went outside and they walked down the dirt road through the town and all you heard was clickity clickity clickity clackity clickity clickity clickity, like insects, every house had someone working the miniature loom. Entire families worked together to keep the loom clicking twenty-four hours a day. No time off. Work work work forever.
And it succeeded.
Poverty was almost eliminated. Severe poverty was almost eliminated, now they were up to regular poverty.
Then Friedman compared that with Japan who had advanced to computerized systems. The loom fills an entire room. Very large spools of silk feed the loom. Every color of the rainbow, every rainbow in the universe, every shade of every color, every tone, every value of tone, every palette of color, pastels, saturated, faint, light, dark, thousands of very large bolts of silk filled the room feeding into the loom in the center.
A photograph is fed into the computer scanner, numbers are entered denoting the dimensions, thread count, thickness and such. Flick the switch and the loom flies into action spools begin spinning around the room as threads are pulled off of them. Most spools remain unmoving. Only the colors needed to reproduce the photograph, and in seconds the picture is reproduced in silk.
Good Lord. That was forty-eight years ago.
Nothing like that shows up in images. Maybe it was a prototype.
I could draw a picture but it would take too long. The loom itself was not large. The spools of silk took up most of the room. And every spool was fed into the loom. Impractical for mass production, when you think about it. Very expensive and extremely specialized. But it showed what they were capable of doing way back then.
Another aspect of textile manufacturing that was shown were the national Chinese art factories that produced silk masterpieces. Labor intensive. Highly specialized. Each art piece moved through teams of artists who all did one specific thing, then the art piece would move on to the next team, passing through dozens of teams until the final product: a gigantic silk mural, or a framed painting in silk such as given as diplomatic gift. Very unfulfilling for the artists, but that's life in communist China.
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