History of Resham

History of Resham !

Resham is the Hindi term for "silk". Silk is the filament secreted by the silkworm when spinning its cocoon, and the names for the threads, yarns, and fabrics made from the filament. Most comericial silk is produced by the cultivated silkworm, Bombyx mori , which feeds exclusively on the leaves of certain varieties of mulberry trees and spins a thin, white filament. Several species of wild silkworm feed on oak, cherry, and mulberry leaves and produce a brown, hairy filament that is three times the thickness of the cultivated filament and is called tussah silk.

Its delicate look and feel is deceptive, because silk is the strongest of all natural fivers, ranked in the strength with the synthetic fiber nylon. Woven into cloth, silk is lightweight but remains warmth, and it is valued as an insulating liner. Nevertheless, it is the coolest of hot weather fabrics, and it can absorb up to 30 percent of its weight in moisture without feeling wet. The fiber is remarkably resistant to heat and will burn only as long as a flame is applied to it.

Silk culture originated in China, perhaps as early as 3d millennium B.C. The wearing of silk apparel was for centuries the exclusive prerogative of the Chinese nobility, and knowledge of sericulture (the production of raw silk) was kept a closely guarded secret.

The Making of Silk

The silkworm constructs its cocoon when it is preparing to enter its chrysalis stage where it shall hibernate and become a butterfly or moth. The cocoon is made from a double filament of silk, wrapped layer by layer around the insect's body and cemented by a gelatinous protein sericin.

Cocoons vary greatly in quality. The higher the amount of sericin deposited on the filament, the lower the grade of filament. Broken cocoons, or some that are spun by two caterpillars together, ar also judged inferior, and their filament is used to make spun silk rather than raw-filament silk.

After grading, the cocoons are placed in hot water to soften the sericin so that filament can be removed and wound on reels. Because single filaments are extremely fine, filaments from five to ten cocoons are wound together by twisting them together and sealing them with melted sericin. The reeled yarn is termed raw silk. In India, the majority of this process is still manual. It takes a great deal of time and patience to extract the filaments from the cocoon and to then twist them together to produce a single yarn for throwing and then weaving.

The raw silk is usually too thin to be used for textile weaving; it is made into a heavier yarn through throwing, a plying process. The fiber is first twisted, then plied with another yarn and twisted again. Once this final process in spinning is completed, the yarn is ready for weaving.

Weaving is the process of interlacing two sets of yearns to produce a fabric. One set of yarns, the longitudinal warp, I stretched along the loom by the weaver before the weaving begins. The weaving involves interlacing the second set, called the weft or filling, horizontally - that is, at right angles to the warp. The weft is usually wound around a shuttle , which passes through the warp, unwinding the yarn as it moves. This alternation between the wrap and weft occurs continuously until the silk fabric has been produced.

More than any other natural fiber, silk has an affinity for color. Dyes are applied either to the unwoven skein or the woven the fabric after degumming, the boiling off of the sericin. After dying, the skein of yarn or fabric is placed on a clothesline to dry.


Types of Raw Silk Yarn

Dupione is a silk yarn made from the cocoons inside which two or more worms have nested. The yarn is soft and uneven and is often used for the filling, or weft, in rough-textured fabrics such as shantung. Tussah, the brownish silk taken from wild silkworms has less luster than cultivated silk and is quite slubby - the yarn varies markedly in thickness. These slubs retain more dye than the thinner portions of the yarn, therefore causing variations in color, in particular in the dupione fabrics.

To this day, even with the inception of power looms, much of the Indian Dupione is still hand-woven. This manual process is what adds the character that silk is famous for and accentuates the beauty of the fabric itself. Therefore, when slubs are evident or dye lots vary, attribute this to the uniqueness of the fabric and its intrinsic value.