Silk and paper

Even though I had seen the beautiful hand made paper in Vietnam, I had never see it made. I took photos.

Use recycled paper, bamboo shreds, elephant dung - anything like this gets boiled and mulched together. It then gets beaten into a thick paste which is spread onto wire screens to dry in the sun. Flowers and leaves can also be spread on the tray.

shreds

beating

boiled mulch

the screens drying

Creative photo Sally !!!!!  :)   AL

AND for years I’ve been buying silk and have seen it spun on weaving looms by woman in Cambodia and Vietnam, I hadn’t seen how the silk comes from silkworms. Today I did. I saw the life cycle from moths laying eggs, to eggs hatching to tiny silk worms, to the worms eating the mulberry leaves, to the worms getting fatter and fatter and then spin their cocoon of yellow silk, and then the moth comes out to mate with other moths, lay eggs and die.

I saw the cocoons being boiled and stuck together then the silk was pulled into raw threads on a loom from the cocoons.

getting the silk off the cocoons 

 Then I saw the different plants and vegetable dyes that are added to give the silk colour. Mung showed us a young teak leaf, he scrunched it and a red dye came out. He said women sometimes use it for their lips! I put it on some cotton from a cotton plant, which was in the village.