Legend has it that silkworms were brought from China, where they were first domesticated, by a princess who was given as a bride to a nomad ruler (1). She could not stand the thought of living without silk cloth and hid cocoons or silkworms eggs in her hair (2). This practice of using body heat to rear the precious silk moth, bombyx mori, was still common in 19th century Central Asian oases towns (3). Women of almost every household wore little cotton bags containing the eggs of the silk moth beneath their clothing, where the warmth of their bodies acted as an incubator. When the larvae hatched they were transferred to a basket and nourished on fresh leaves from the indispensable white mulberry tree.

The silkworms grew and eventually crawled up on the mulberry trees to spin their cocoons, which were then harvested and sorted. The finest were set aside for the following year's crop and hung in bags near the ceiling until the next April (4). The remaining cocoons were placed in the sun to kill the larvae. In Central Asia, the most common method of obtaining the long silk thread from the cocoon was boiling. In the cauldron the sticky sericin that bound the threads together dissolved, and the separated filaments could be retrieved by catching them on a dipstick. The raw silk, or grège, was reeled and separated by quality. Filaments were then combined to make a usable thread and wound on small spools.

Once the thread was obtained, skilled craftsmen would then prepare the warp threads for the dyeing. Central Asian ikats were consistently made with silk warp threads (the longitudinal thread set on the loom) patterned by resist-dyeing. The plain, unpatterned weft threads of either cotton or silk did not show because the warp threads outnumbered and covered them completely in what is called a warp-faced or rep textile.

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(1) The date of the first native silk production in Central Asia is debatable. Zerrnickel traces the domestication of the silkworm in western Turkestan back to the 2nd century AD ("The Textile Arts of Uzbekistan" by Maria Zerrnickel, p.213) while Gibbon & Hale estimated it to have occurred around the 3rd or 4th centuries AD.
(2) Johannes Kalter, ed., Uzbekistan: Heirs to the Silk Road (Thames and Hudson, 1997), 213.
(3) Kate Fitz Gibbon and Andrew Hale, Ikat: Splendid Silks of Central Asia: the Guido Goldman Collection (Lawrence King Publishing in association with Alan Marcuson Publishing, 1999), 24.
(4) Ibid., 24.
(5) Ibid., 80.
(6) Ibid., 80.