Day 11 - Siem Reap
This morning we drove 40km to Banteay Srei, built soon after Ankor Wat, but of a warmer, rose-coloured stone, now having a rusty hue. It's much smaller than Angkor Wat, and therefore much more digestible, especially if you are almost the only ones there.
On the way back to Siem Reap, we visited Golden Silk -- an enterprise far out in the rice fields started by a Cambodian woman who grew up in the French town of Colmar, but retur ed to Cambodia with her French husband to help develop the silk industry for the benefit of people in the villages and hamlets of her country.
At Golden Silk they grow mulburry trees, feed the leaves to silk worms (actually caterpillars), boil the empty cocoons to dissolve the saliva, extract the silk thread, remove any impurities, and prepare for weaving. The first step after selecting the design (Golden Silk originals) is to take a single strand of silk, mount the end on a rack the lengths and width of the fabric to be made, wind the strand back and forth across the length of the rack until the strand fills the entire width. Next, using plastic wrappers, the threads on all sections of the rack that are not to be died with colour A are wrapped in plastic. Colour A is then applied to the entire rack, dyeing only the unwrapped portions of the thread. The thread is then unwrapped and rewrapped so that only the colour B sections of the design are exposed, and colour B is applied. And so on for the remaining colours.
When the entire rack of thread has been dyed, the thread is unwound from the rack, and rewound as the weft on the loom where the weaving will happen. It is still a single strand of thread, but now different segments of the strand have been dyed different colours, so when the thread is mounted (properly) on the loom as the weft, the desired pattern reappears. The warp is then woven into the weft, et voila.
It takes up to one year to weave a piece of fabric measuring 50x100 centimeters in this way.
In the evening we took a turn on Pub Street, the Times Square of Siem Reap.
On the way back to Siem Reap, we visited Golden Silk -- an enterprise far out in the rice fields started by a Cambodian woman who grew up in the French town of Colmar, but retur ed to Cambodia with her French husband to help develop the silk industry for the benefit of people in the villages and hamlets of her country.
At Golden Silk they grow mulburry trees, feed the leaves to silk worms (actually caterpillars), boil the empty cocoons to dissolve the saliva, extract the silk thread, remove any impurities, and prepare for weaving. The first step after selecting the design (Golden Silk originals) is to take a single strand of silk, mount the end on a rack the lengths and width of the fabric to be made, wind the strand back and forth across the length of the rack until the strand fills the entire width. Next, using plastic wrappers, the threads on all sections of the rack that are not to be died with colour A are wrapped in plastic. Colour A is then applied to the entire rack, dyeing only the unwrapped portions of the thread. The thread is then unwrapped and rewrapped so that only the colour B sections of the design are exposed, and colour B is applied. And so on for the remaining colours.
When the entire rack of thread has been dyed, the thread is unwound from the rack, and rewound as the weft on the loom where the weaving will happen. It is still a single strand of thread, but now different segments of the strand have been dyed different colours, so when the thread is mounted (properly) on the loom as the weft, the desired pattern reappears. The warp is then woven into the weft, et voila.
It takes up to one year to weave a piece of fabric measuring 50x100 centimeters in this way.
In the evening we took a turn on Pub Street, the Times Square of Siem Reap.
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