Inspection------Silk Organza 8mm 140cm

Silk Chiffon 8mm 140cm 200m Order

Mulberry silk fabric or Tussah silk fabric?! Which is better? ----By Lynn from Predatex Silk Co., Ltd

1.    Difference from their silk worms!

Mulberry silk fabrics are made of mulberry silk which is cocooned by mulberry silk worms who feed on mulberry leaves while tussah silk fabrics are made of mulberry silk which is cocooned by tussah silk worms who feed on tussah leaves.  And they are no the same kind of silk worms at all! Nowadays mulberry silk worms are raised by people and tussah silk worms are wild worms.

2.     Difference from their appearance,handfeel, usage and price!

Mulberry silk fabric is in delicate white, supple and flexible with fine and symmetry fiber.

While tussah silk fabric is relatively stiff in handfeel and the thickness is uneven with more knots. The color for tussah fabric is not as white as mulberry, but some kind of gray and blue!

In general, the application of mulberry silk fabric is more extensive. It is the first choice for gowns and fashion with items such as silk satin charmeuse, silk georgette, silk crepe de chine, silk habutai, silk chiffon and so on. And tussah silk is mainly used for quilt or silk blanket,sometimes coats.

Pricewise, because the mulberry silkworms need artificial farming with much greater demand, so the price is higher than the tussah silk fabrics in general.

3.    Which is better indeed? Mulberry silk or Tussah silk!

Personally I think mulberry silk fabric is better as they have been well recognized by people for thousands of years for its luxurious characteristics. Even through tussah silk fabrics are recently used by some designers for fashion uses due to its “raw”and “wild” characteristics, they are still not widely used or accepted! Of course, Predatex Silk is specialized for mulberry silk fabric for many years and we might have some “biases”on this issue! Then what do you think about this issue or would you like to know more? Fine, contact Predatex Silk through website: www.predatextile.com or send us emails directly with our sales director Jasom via jasom@predatextile.com

Time for examples of screen printing silk fabric prices now!

SilkHabotai/Habutai 8mm(weight) 140cm(width) printing===About USD8.50/mtr

SilkCrepe de Chine 18mm(weight) 140cm(width) printing===About USD14.50/mtr

SilkSatin Charmeuse 40mm(weight) 140cm(width) printing===About USD28.50/mtr

If you have purchased silk fabrics with price more or less than above mentioned list, congratulations to you, you are dealing with a reasonable silk supplier! If the price is lower than that or even much lower, trust me, your "silk" must be fake with polyesters or viscose! If the price reached you are much higher, please do not hesitate to contact Predatex Silk ASAP for reasonable price and reliable quality! Predatex Silk, based in Mainland China, deals with only 100% Mulberry silk fabrics in best quality!

For more information, please kindly check our website for more www.predatextile.com

Contacts: Lynn@predatextile.com or Jasom@predatextile.com +86-18298258162(WhatsApp)

For anyone who would like to copy this article, please clarify that it is from Lynn at www.predatextile.com.

Thank you very much!

Silk Crepe De Chine 16mm 140cm 10m Order

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SILK FABRIC 25mm ELASTIC SATIN

Silk taffeta 19mm 114cm sample order

1 Million Spiders Make Golden Spider Silk fabric for Rare Cloth---re-edited by Lynn from Predatex Silk fabric.

    A rare textile made from the silk of more than a million wild spiders goes on display in 2009 at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

To produce this unique golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot by 4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk existing in the world today.

“Spider silk is very elastic, and it has a tensile strength that is incredibly strong compared to steel or Kevlar,” said textile expert Simon Peers, who co-led the project. “There’s scientific research going on all over the world right now trying to replicate the tensile properties of spider silk and apply it to all sorts of areas in medicine and industry, but no one up until now has succeeded in replicating 100 percent of the properties of natural spider silk.”

Peers came up with the idea of weaving spider silk after learning about the French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1880s and 1890s. Camboué built a small, hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once, without harming them.

“Simon managed to build a replica of this 24-spider-silking machine that was used at the turn of the century,” said Nicholas Godley, who co-led the project with Peers. As an experiment, the pair collected an initial batch of about 20 spiders. “When we stuck them in the machine and started turning it, lo and behold, this beautiful gold-colored silk started coming out,” Godley said.

Father Comboué, who one historical text erroneously calls Father Comboné, had a partner in designing his machine, M. Nogué. Together, they got quite a spider silk fabric industry going in Madagascar and even exhibited “a complete set of bed hangings” at the Paris Exposition of 1898. That fabric has since been lost, but the exhibition brought them some attention, excerpted below.

“It should be said that the female halabe allows herself to be relieved of her silken store with exemplary docility and this in spite of the fact that she is distinguished for her ferocity; her usual treatment of the males who pay her court is to eat them and she feasts without compunction on members of her own sex weaker than herself. M Nogue’s apparatus consists of a sort of stocks arranged to pin down on their backs a dozen spiders. The spiders accept this imprisonment with resignation and lie perfectly quiet while the silken thread issuing from their bodies is rapidly wound on to a reel by means of a cleverly devised machine worked by hand.” — Great Britain Board of Trade Journal

“The first experiments of Father Comboné were made in the simplest manner. The spiders were imprisoned in match boxes and by slightly compressing the abdomen he managed to extract and wind upon a little reel turned by hand it thread that sometimes attained a length of 500 yards… it is to the ingenuity of M. Nogue, one of the sub directors, that we owe the apparatus which permits the thread to be wound mechanically and to be twisted and doubled in the quickest and most practical manner. This is done by means of a curious little machine, not easy to describe, in which the spiders are imprisoned by the throat while undergoing the operation. Young Malagasy girls go daily to a park near the school to gather three or four hundred spiders which they carry in osier baskets with wooden covers to be divested of their webs… Generally after having submitted to the reeling operation the spiders are put back in the park for a couple of weeks… [The silk’s] color when first spun is a beautiful gold and it requires no carding or preparation of any sort before being woven. Will this be the silk of the future?” — The Literary Digest

But to make a textile of any significant size, the silk experts had to drastically scale up their project. “Fourteen thousand spiders yields about an ounce of silk,” Godley said, “and the textile weighs about 2.6 pounds. The numbers are crazy.”

Researchers have long been intrigued by the unique properties of spider silk, which is stronger than steel or Kevlar but far more flexible, stretching up to 40 percent of its normal length without breaking. Unfortunately, spider silk is extremely hard to mass produce: Unlike silk worms, which are easy to raise in captivity, spiders have a habit of chomping off each other’s heads when housed together.

To get as much silk as they needed, Godley and Peers began hiring dozens of spider handlers to collect wild arachnids and carefully harness them to the silk-extraction machine. “We had to find people who were willing to work with spiders,” Godley said, “because they bite.”

By the end of the project, Godley and Peers extracted silk from more than 1 million female golden orb spiders, which are abundant throughout Madagascar and known for the rich golden color of their silk. Because the spiders only produce silk during the rainy season, workers collected all the spiders between October and June.

Then an additional 12 people used hand-powered machines to extract the silk and weave it into 96-filament thread. Once the spiders had been milked, they were released into back into the wild, where Godley said it takes them about a week to regenerate their silk. “We can go back and re-silk the same spiders,” he said. “It’s like the gift that never stops giving.”

Of course, spending four years to produce a single textile of spider silk isn’t very practical for scientists trying to study the properties of spider silk or companies that want to manufacture the fabric for use as a biomedical scaffold or an alternative to Kevlar armor. Several groups have tried inserting spider genes into bacteria (or even cows and goats) to produce silk, but so far, the attempts have been only moderately successful.

Part of the reason it’s so hard to generate spider silk in the lab is that it starts out as a liquid protein that’s produced by a special gland in the spider’s abdomen. Using their spinnerets, spiders apply a physical force to rearrange the protein’s molecular structure and turn it into solid silk.

“When we talk about a spider spinning silk, we’re talking about how the spider applies forces to produce a physical transformation from liquid to solid,” said spider silk expert Todd Blackledge of the University of Akron, who was not involved in creating the textile. “Scientists simply can’t replicate that as well as a spider does it. Every year we’re getting closer and closer to being able to mass-produce it, but we’re not there yet.”

For now, it seems we’ll have to be content with one incredibly beautiful cloth, graciously provided by more than a million spiders.

Images: 1) AMNH/R. Mickens 2) Nicholas Godley and Simon Peers

How much is this golden silk fabric per meter? We do not know and we do not have to know as there is nowhere you can buy. But we can buy mulberry silk fabrics, which is most widely used as luxurious fabrics for wedding gowns or other fashions.

Time for examples of silk fabric(White or dyed) prices now!

SilkChiffon 8mm(weight) 140cm(width) ===About USD6.50/mtr

SilkSatin Charmeuse 19mm(weight) 140cm(width) ===About USD13.00/mtr

SilkCrepe De Chine 40mm(weight) 140cm(width)=== About USD25.00/mtr

If you have purchased silk fabrics with price more or less than above mentioned list, congratulations to you, you are dealing with a reasonable silk supplier! If the price is lower than that or even much lower, trust me, your "silk" must be fake with polyesters or viscose! If the price reached you are much higher, please do not hesitate to contact Predatex Silk ASAP for reasonable price and reliable quality! Predatex Silk, based in Mainland China, deals with only 100% Mulberry silk fabrics in best quality!

For more information, please kindly check our website for more www.predatextile.com

Contacts: Lynn@predatextile.com or Jasom@predatextile.com +86-18298258162(WhatsApp)

For anyone who would like to copy this article, please clarify that it is from Lynn at www.predatextile.com.

Thank you very much!