all about the intriguing silkworm
Lynda Hallinan delves into the intriguing world of the silkworm and, after a lot of sudsy pummelling, proudly produces a merino and silk felted lampshade.
You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, or so the old Scottish proverb goes. But who knew that you can make a fetching silk purse – or, in my case, a funky felted lampshade – from silkworm spew and fluffy merino fibres rubbed together between two bits of plastic bubble wrap?
Beautiful things often have insalubrious beginnings, and none more so than delicate strands of silk. When the Scots first coined their famous proverb in 1699, they probably had no idea how silk was made, for a lady pig’s hairy lugs are actually on a par, romance-wise, with bulimic Bombyx mori silkworms.
From the minute they hatch until they start to spin their silken cocoons, regurgitating a single fine strand of silk up to 900m long, silkworms are very hungry caterpillars. They also have very exacting tastes: they only eat the glossy green, heart-shaped leaves of the white mulberry tree, Morus alba, though they’ll munch on other mulberry species when food is scarce.
(Fun fact: the white mulberry is also famed as the fastest pollen flinger in the plant world, with catapulting catkins that can shoot pollen out at 560kph or almost half the speed of sound.)
I have three weeping white mulberry trees in my garden, as well as a purple mulberry in my orchard, but all I’ve made from my trees is a few pots of jam. I’d clean forgotten about their role in sericulture – the commercial farming of silkworms – until a chance conversation with a local artist at the coffee cart in our wee village green.
Caroline Burton is a fibre artist who runs felting and fibre art workshops in her rural studio in Ararimu, a stone’s throw from my children’s primary school. (She also exhibits and runs workshops throughout New Zealand; for details see carolineburton.co.nz.)
Caroline was born in Canterbury – in south-east England, not the South Island – and originally had a thing for rocks, rather than paper or scissors. Fascinated by geology, she studied mining and worked as an engineer in the mineral processing industry before moving to south Auckland to raise her family.
It was during this stay-at-home parenthood phase that she found time to explore her creative passion for textiles.
“Mum taught me to sew when I was a little girl and I’ve always enjoyed it. I made my own wedding dress, and dresses for friends, and once I did think about making wedding dresses for a living, but wasn’t sure I had the right skills. Later on a friend taught me how to knit, and once I started working with wool I discovered wet felting.”
Perhaps it was inevitable that Caroline would go on to successfully combine her felting and dressmaking skills to win the Supreme Award, on debut, with a full-length felted gown at the 2016 Creative Fibre National Textile Awards.
When I joined six local ladies at one of Caroline’s Felt and Light Workshops, she began by reassuring us. “Don’t worry,” she said. “It’s impossible to make an ugly lampshade.”
But I was worried, for despite my reputation as a crafty gardener, I’ve never been a particularly creative crafter.
At school, when my stoic sewing teacher, Mrs Goodburn, confidently assured me that anyone could whip up a floral nightie, I proved her wrong. Well, partially wrong: I did make a nightie but I couldn’t fit my head through the neck hole, and thus had to hastily adapt the design with scissors and some wonky hand-stitching in order to pass home economics.
However, unlike the slavish adherence to a sewing pattern, the felting process is mercurial and magical. We were each handed
“Silkworms are very hungry caterpillars and also have very exacting tastes. ”
two sheets of bubble wrap and a large kitchen sponge cloth, then we selected six dyed silk “hankies” (not the sort you blow your nose on, but the name given to a single unspooled cocoon that has been pierced and pulled out into a square shape) in our favourite colours.
Some went bright and bold; I chose a smoky mix of brown, charcoal, pale blue and sage green.
The art of felting is surprisingly physical, as the delicate work of arranging these wisps of coloured silk to make the initial design gave way to the huffing, puffing, rolling and rubbing required to bind together the superfine overlay of merino fibres.
Like convent laundry girls, we dutifully pummelled our projects with soap-sudsy palms for about 15 minutes until, as if by magic, we were suddenly holding a solid tube of felted fabric. This was then rolled, rinsed and pulled tightly over a semi-transparent plastic tube that, once we’d popped a strand of fairy lights inside, made for a functional work of art.
I was, just quietly, utterly chuffed. Even my husband seemed impressed as he basked in the soft glow of my new lampshade, which I proudly installed on our bedside table next to a pair of cute yellow needle-felted bears. (I bought the bears, which were handmade by Dawn Harper, at the delightfully named One Off Old Stuff vintage shop in Ashburton.)
Or perhaps he simply knew better than to comment on my crafting prowess, given his own recent attempt at wet felting. The last time I went away for a weekend, my husband ventured into the laundry and accidentally hot-washed, then dried, the exquisite (and expensive) handwoven shot silk scarf I brought home from a girls’ trip to India. It came out of the dryer as a tight matted coil of golden-orange rope that, luckily for him, had shrunk so much I couldn’t even try to strangle him with it.
“Like convent laundry girls we dutifully pummelled our projects.”