Artisans Angkor
When the worms have grown enough, they are put in baskets. From there, they will spin their cocoons in five days and will produce about three hundreds meters of silk each. The cocoons are then put in sunlight to avoid them undergoing their metamorphosis into mature moths. However, 20% of them reach the breeding process and the female moths will lay and hatch its eggs within nine to twelve days.
The cocoons are soaked in hot water in order to soften the sericin (also known as silk gum) which coat the fibres and stick the cocoons together. Silk threads are then unwound and reeled together to produce a single thread. Weavers at Angkor Silk Farm make both raw silk and fine silk that do not have the same texture at all. Sericin has not been completely removed from raw silk threads, which will give a rougher texture to the fabric at the end.
Orbiculariae
Whether spiders that weave true orb webs form a coherent group, and so should be classified together, is a question that has a long history. Two groups of spiders that spin orb webs are the Uloboridae and the Araneidae. Although their webs have a very similar overall architecture, the sticky catching threads are created in different ways. Uloborid spiders have a cribellum – a flat plate from which a particular kind of silk emerges – and a calamistrum – a structure formed of bristles on the metatarsus of the fourth leg, used to "comb" the cribellate silk into extremely fine strands that are adhesive without having any "glue" present. Araneid spiders have silk-producing organs that add fine droplets of a glue-like substance to silk of normal thickness to create viscid silk. (Spiders that do not spin orb webs can also be divided into those that produce cribellate silk and those that produce viscid silk.)