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.
Wild silk
Wild silks are often referred to in India as 'Vanya' silks: The term 'Vanya' is of Sanskrit origin, meaning untamed, wild, or forest-based. Muga, Tasar, and Eri silkworms are not fully tamed and the world lovingly calls the silks they produce as 'wild silks'.
India produces four kinds of silk: mulberry, tasar, muga and eri. The silkworm "Bombyx mori" is fed on mulberry leaves cultivated in plantations. Silkworms are also found wild on forest trees, e.g "Antheraea paphia" which produces the tasar silk (Tussah). "Antheraea paphia" feeds on several trees such as "Anogeissus latifolia", "Terminalia tomentosa", "T. arjuna" ("Terminalia arjuna"), "Lagerstroemia parviflora" and "Madhuca indica". Wild silkworm "Antheraea assamensis" produces muga silk, and another wild silkworm "Philosamia synthia ricini" (= "Samia cynthia") produces eri silk. The estimated annual production of tasar silk is 130 tonnes. Production of other types of silk exceeds 10 000 tonnes (Gupta 1994).
In 2015, Adarsh Gupta K of Nagaraju's research team at Centre for DNA Fingerprinting and Diagnostics, Hyderabad, India, discovered the complete sequence and the protein structure of Muga Silk Fibroin and published it in "Scientific Reports".