Quality Improvement of Eri Hand Spun Silk Yarn and Woven Fabric from Card Sliver

Abstract

Eri silk is an economically value silk and produced for hand spun and hand loom by local community enterprise. But it was not able to produce enough volume of hand spun yarn to meet the market demand. Because opening the Eri cocoon by hand is time-consuming process and producing yarns with differences of yarn numbers, tenacity, yarn twist/inch, and imperfection depending on the skill of the hand spinner and degumming techniques. Therefore, the local community enterprises with yarn spinning expertise were selected to be an agent for hand spinning of the yarn derived from sliver produced with cocoon opening and community card sliver machines. This research aimed to enhance the quality of hand spun Eri silk yarn by the carding machine for local community in order to compare the properties of the hand spun yarns from card slivers produced by community and industrial machines. This study had also tested the properties of Eri silk woven fabrics using hand spun yarn as weft yarns which designed the fabrics and dying with natural colors by local community enterprise. The results showed that the properties of hand spun yarn from the community carding machine had the same quality as from industrial sliver B, but had less quality than from sliver A. Besides, the Eri silk fabrics were woven by using Eri hand spun yarn as weft and using mulberry silk yarn or industrial Eri silk yarn as warp. Result from the designed pattern fabric based on color trend and dying with natural dye indicated that the woven fabrics could protect UV radiation with enough strength in weft and warp directions, which standardized to be made the woven fabric products.