Silk Day

In Beijing, we went to a silk factory.  The factory was filled with silk almost everywhere we looked.  We learned how silk gets from the cocoon to things made of silk.

Silk starts with silk worms.  Here they are eating mulberry leaves.  That's their favorite thing to eat!

    This is a picture of silk cocoons that the worms spin to become moths.  The worms spin a cocoon just like other caterpillars when they get ready to turn into butterflies or moths, except these cocoons are silk!

When the people want to make silk fabric, they put the cocoons in some liquid and stir it around with a brush until they're soaked and soggy.

This is what they look like after you dunk them in liquid and stir them around.

Next, they stretch the silk out over a frame to dry.

Then you can take the silk strands and spin it into thread on a loom.  This is a loom we saw at the silk factory.

You can also stretch the silk to make things like quilts or cushions for chairs and couches.  They let us stretch many layers of silk to make a quilt for a bed.  It is small here.

As we all started pulling at the same time, it got bigger and fit with the rest so it made a puffy quilt that would be comfortable to sleep on.

Can you imagine how many cocoons it would take to make a quilt like that?!

The silk factory was one of the most interesting places I can remember on our trip to China.

Catching Kapoks

As the stars dance around, little children come out to catch kapok flowers.  One of my favorite nights in China was when we went to a restaurant named Lucy's.  Since it was a nice evening, we sat outside on a patio.  When we got there, there were children looking up at the big kapok trees and rushing to grab blossoms when they fell down.  We asked Jordon why so many people collected kapok flowers, and he said that they were dried and made into tea to help your sore throat. 

After dinner, one of my friends and I went out and tried to gather the flowers as they fell.  Even though it was dark, twinkle lights were stringing from the trees and on the roof of the restaurant.  It felt peaceful.

Once I was looking up at the sky and all of a sudden a kapok just landed right behind me.  It seemed like if I stepped back, it would have landed right on top of me!

 The kapok flower is a very large flower.  We don't have any that are so big here.  You can tell how big they are by comparing it to the fork.

Whenever I found a kapok flower, I put it on the table to see what a big stack I could make.

As the night went on, my stack grew bigger by the minute.  Soon I had a large pile on the table.

When it was time to walk back to our hotel, I gathered up all my flowers and gave them to a lady who was gathering them to make tea.  She was really happy because she didn't have to wait for them to fall, and I had a whole armful for her.

Catching kapoks felt magical that night because it's almost like catching falling stars!