Silk Stories - Update 7/15/2011

So much has happened with our silkworms in one week!  Most of our largest silkworms are four and a half weeks old and many of them are in the process of spinning their cocoons.  As each silkworm gets ready to spin we carefully place it into the cocoonery. Our cocoonery is composed of many cardboard paper and toilet paper tubes, stacked tightly together in a box. And where have all these tubes come from? Just about everywhere! All along Old Main Street people are saving their tubes for us: at the post office, at The Deerfield Inn, at our local small market and at farm stands.  Our Historic House Guides are saving them  and so are our museum curators, our business office, house- keeping and  maintenance departments, all contributing to the cocoonery. We are so pleased and so are the silkworms.

 Many visitors to Historic Deerfield continue to enjoy the silkworms. Today we had two visitors from Japan. One woman talked about growing up in Gunma Prefecture, a large and important silk producing region of Japan. She told us about her parents and grandparents working in the silk industry.

Spinning a cocoon takes about two days, during which the silkworm moves it head in a figure eight pattern. The silk comes from two glands located just below the silkworms’ mouth. Two days of continual spinning to produces a continuous filament of silk one mile long.