Artisans workshop and Silk making.

I started my day with a trip to the Les Chantiers Ecoles, Artisans of Angkor in Siem Reap.  It is a school that teaches traditional Khmer artisanship, including lacquer-making, silk painting, tin smithing, wood and stone carving, to impoverished young adults. I took a tour of the school while it was in session, where I was able to observe the people working on their different projects.  I saw buddha being made from start to finish... including his blueprints (see pictures).  It was neat to see all the different processes and the tools being used.  After I was done with investigating the workshops I sat and waited for my second tour to begin, at 9:30 am.  One of the students sat down and talked to me about his training and how he learned English and taught himself Spanish from the internet (impressive).  He talked a little bit about the training, and the school.  He explained they train not only crafts like wood carving, but other technical disciplines, like electrians, plumbers, etc.

Silk painting

Silver workshop, where they make handmade silver plated boxes and decorations

Sanding a wood carving of Buhhda

Buddha blueprints... hee hee

Chiseling out a stone sculpture of Buddha

After I was done touring the Artisans workshops, I hopped on a courtesy bus and went to learn about silk making at another site 16 km outside of Siem Reap. This was my favorite part of the tour... and most interesting.  The young tour guide explained and showed me how silk is made from the worm to the final product.  It starts with harvesting the larva of the silk worm.  The larva is left to mature into silk worms and eventually nature takes its course and the worm produces a cocoon. This process takes on average 34 days.  A select few are left to mature into moths, so they can reproduce.  After the larva has been laid the moth dies.  Then the cycle of the silk worm continues.  The precious cocoons are what the silk is actually spun from. The cocoons are boiled in hot water.  This loosens the fine threads of the cocoon.  A tiny thread of silk is gently pulled off the outer layer of the cocoon and it begins to unravel the thread.  The initial or top layer of the cocoon is what raw silk is made from. It produces 100 m of silk.  There are 3 more inner layers to the cocoon, from which fine silk is spun.  300 meters of fine silk is produced from one cocoon.
.  

A timeline of how to create silk from a silk worm's cocoon

silk worm cocoons

Boiling down the cocoons, from which they peel the layers and literally spin the cocoon into thread

The outer layer of the cocoon makes an average of 100m of raw silk thread, and 3 inner layers of the cocoon make the  300 meters of fine silk.

After the silk thread has been washed and dyed it is wound 

The thread is then wound onto smaller bobbins for the shuttles (an automated machine is doing this)

Dyed raw silk thread

Women setting up a looms warp.  A tedious process considering how fine the threads are.  This can take up to one week depending on the pattern.  These girls worked at a remarkable pace; one separating the fine threads, other other pulling it through the teeth of the warp.

Further setting up of the warp pattern

Winding the thread onto bobbins.  I thought this was interesting, because they are using the rim of a bicycle wheel,  a bicycle chain, and the crank of the bicycle's foot pedal.  Ingenious design... and very smooth running

There are 15 buildings with weavers, 30 looms in each building.  All that could be heard while walking the weavery was the clatter of the shuttles passing back and forth at lightening speed.  One scarf can take up to 1 week to produce, or as short as 1/2 a day, depending on the pattern and number of colors used.

The beautiful colours of the silk 

I thought this was funny; the bottom of the dress is made of the silk cocoons, progresses into silk thread and finishes up top with a silk bodice.