How to judge the quality of mulberry silk duvet?

What are the differences between silks? 

First, you need to know what is Mulberry Silk and what is Tussah Silk.
Second, you need to know how silk has been extracted, by and or by machine? These are two completely different results.
The handmade mulberry silk duvet is made up of 100% long mulberry silk. It is the top-grade product in the duvet market. Machine-made silk duvet is usually made with silk that is treated by chemicals, crushed by machines, with rayon and broken silk all mixed up together. We will demonstrate how the production varies for different silk fillings.

Easy & Simple Steps

By Feel: Pure mulberry silk is a fine fiber and feels very delicate and soft to touch. Pure silk floss feels more delicate yet less smooth than lower-grade ones which have been treated by machines.
By Smell: Inferior silk gives off a slight smell of chemicals and silkworm pupa, which will become stronger in a more humid and warmer environment during use. This smell is definitely harmful to your health, especially to those who have an allergic constitution. hand-extracted silk smells fresh as a result of being dried by air with no bleach or softeners added.
By Color: 100% natural silk floss has a soft and lustrous pearly color; in contrast, as a result of bleaching, inferior floss looks artificially white and shiny. Hand extracted silk has a natural pearl color while machine silk is shinier with a whitish color.
Watching this presentation: you will learn about the three different types of silk-filled duvets: hand-extracted silk filling, the machine extracted long fiber silk filling, chopped short fiber silk filling.
Length of silk filament: The most exquisite duvet is made of long and unbroken mulberry silk which is stretched and hand layered one by one in a criss-cross pattern. It is very smooth and even throughout the duvet; in contrast, silk in the machine-made quilt is usually broken. Shake the quilt quickly, if it is made by a machine, tiny dust-like fibers can be seen falling down from the duvet. This fluff may enter the respiration systems and further do harm to people’s health, especially to babies and children.
Flexibility: Silk is very flexible and strong. In contrast, silk in a machine-made duvet is loose and fragile. Even and flossy structure: Hand-layered silk-filled quilt is two times bigger in dimension compared to other silk quilts of the same weight. It is even and flossy throughout the duvet, without any cold or hard dots which usually happened to machine-made silk duvets.

Mulberry silk

Silkworms that are raised exclusively on mulberry leaves produce a silk called mulberry silk.

Mulberry Silk Cocoons

These cocoons are the mulberry silk cocoons and have a pearly color, are smaller in shape, smoother, finer, and rounder. The silk floss is softer and enriched with proteins & amino acids.

Tussah Silk Cocoons

These are collected from the wild and are from worms that eat oak leaves. They are rougher, coarser, and have a dark brown color. The silk threads are less springy and have uneven surfaces and can be woven into fabrics with a coarse surface. This silk fabric is really for making curtains, cushions, bedspreads, garments, and is less luxurious as filling for duvets.

Hand Extracted Silk Floss

This video shows how the floss is teased from each cocoon. It is washed and stretched by hand to make it into a cap-shaped silk net ready for natural drying in the air.

As you have watched this process of hand extraction you can now understand that all our silk floss produces a duvet filling in which there are no additives, softeners, conditioner, or bleach. This type of silk-filled duvet costs more to produce.

After the silk floss has been pulled into the shape like a cap, it is then dried by air, in partial shade. See the following photo.

Air Drying Silk Floss

This video shows that after the silk floss caps are dried they need to be rubbed in order to loosen the fiber and shake off any debris. 

After drying, the silk floss caps are stretched opened by hand to shape them ready for the next step – layering.

Hand-stretched into the duvet casing.

The hand-extracted silk floss is very fine and comes in smaller pieces. Therefore many layers must be sued to make one duvet filling. Hence these duvets are airier, softer, lighter, and springier. No chemicals whatsoever have been used in the whole process! 

When silk is hand-stretched and layered in this way mulberry silk is produced to fill duvets that are far superior in comfort, durability, quality, and beneficial to the health of their users. The layering method traps air between each layer and ensures the level of spreading of the filling. The result is the duvet as soft as a cloud, just like slumbering in an angel’s wing! Mulberry Silk Filled Comforter