Silk earns its reputation as the Queen of Fabrics with wondrous qualities of luxurious, simmering, beauty - and its good for you!

- 100% natural and the most hypoallergenic of all fabrics, due to its natural protein structure. Silk bedding has found to have remarkable benefits for people who suffer from dust mites, mould, and fungus allergies.

- Silk is saturated with essential amino acids. It is said that sleeping on silk pillowcases delays wrinkles and prevents bad-hair days!

Silk is naturally self-adjusting fabric, it keeps you warm in winter and cool when temperatures are warmer. It can absorb up to 30% of its weight in moisture without feeling damp and it lets the skin breathe.

- Silk fibers have a triangular cross section with rounded corners. This allows light to hit at many different angles, giving a wonderful luminescent quality.

- Besides being delicate and smooth to the touch, it is the strongest natural fiber with unique durability and endurance. Weight for weight silk is stronger than steel. In fact until World War 1 some bulletproof vests were even made from silk.

- Silk is wrinkle and tear resistant, and surprisingly easy to care for - the surface actually resists dirt!

- It is said that the natural beauty and sensuous feel of silk aids meditation by amplifying the subtle energies that flow within. "Silk is particularly good at turning into and holding a vibration, and wearing a silk robe is like stepping into a sacred space" says Coral Temple, London's acclaimed meditation
teacher.

"get some silk and feel the difference"

Silk production originated in China and soon found its way to Cambodia where it reached its apex in the great Angkor civilization, the heart of the Khmer empire.

Once a very popular skill throughout the country, silk weaving was fast becoming a lost art in Cambodia due to the Khmer Rouge.

Developing this skill once again ensures the continuation of the traditional art and builds a future for the community through training, employment and sales of this desirable commodity.

Today, Cambodia's silk production methods are deeply routed in ancient tradition. Sericulture, the cultivation of silk, involves raising the silkworms (which are technically caterpillars) of the Bobyx mori moth. For the first six weeks of their life, silkworms feed exclusively and continuously on mulberry leaves - they eat nearly 50,000 times their weight during this period and need to shed their skin four times!

Walk into a silk farm and it sounds like rain is gently falling on a wooden roof - its the sound of silkworms munching away on mulberry leaves!

When the silkworm has grown to about 3 inches long, it stop eating, changes color and starts spinning a cocoon by moving its head in a figure-8 pattern. Using its salivary glands, the silkworm produces a long, continuous filament which solidifies on contact with the air and forms twin filaments of protein material. A second pair of glands secrete a sticky liquid to bond the two filaments. Steadily over the two or three and about 300,000 figure-8's, the silkworm spins about a mile of filament and is completely encased on a cocoon.

At this stage, cocoons are sorted by size, color, shape, and texture, as the quality of silk depends on the combination of these attributes. Cocoons vary from white to yellow to gray.

The cocoons are then treated with hot and cold water which softens the binding material and releases the silk in a continuous filament. Very gently the delicate process of "reeling" or combines the three to ten strands of filaments together to make raw silk. It takes about 30,000 silkworms to produce 12 pounds of raw silk!

Raw silk is then washed in soap and boiling water to remove the remaining sericin. When this is washed out in soap and boiling water, the fabric is left soft, lustrous, and up to 30% lighter. Raw silk is twisted into a strand sufficiently strong for weaving or knitting. This process of creating the silk yarn is called "throwing" and prevents the thread from splitting into its constituent fibers. It is then dyed to the desired colour and woven into beautiful silk fabric.

Visit Fair Fabric learn more about silk and sericulture.

Although the image of the Cambodian woman has always been compared to the celestial goddesses on the walls of the great temples Angkor Wat, in today's reality, prevailing social and cultural norms, extreme poverty, lack of education and little protection from the law perpetuate a widespread lack of respect for women leading to high levels of domestic violence and sex trafficking.

While working in Cambodia, it was the women who captured my heart. Their honest smiles and ethical values remain in tact, in spite of the tremendous hardships.

Due to the recent history, more than half of the Cambodian population is female - one quarter of households in rural areas are headed by a woman. Cambodia's women are often responsible for family survival: they find and prepare food, and they care for sick and older relatives and the children.

But society offers women a huge burden of family responsibility with very little access to education and severely limited economic opportunities.

Fair Fabric supports Cambodian women, who often are:

1. Denied education - if families are forced to choose which of their children they can afford to send to school, they usually choose to send the boys. Over 45% of Cambodian women are illiterate, and only 16% of girls aged 7-9 are enrolled in school, while only 5% of girls are enrolled in upper secondary school. Many girls leave school is due to lack of funds, the need to work to feed the family and a an ingrained lack of understanding of the benefits of education.

2. Forced into the sex trade - families sell their daughters to the sex-trade in return for a lump-sum payment, or a loan which the young girl sells sex to repay. She herself often remains unpaid. In Stung Treng providence, the sex trade is aggressive - people there say that girls as young as nine or ten sell their virginity for less than one dollar.

3. Not encouraged to concentrate on work skills - traditionally, women are encouraged to stay at home and care for the family, whereas the man is seen as being the breadwinner. Only 6% of the female workforce in Cambodia is actually paid.

4. At increasing risk of becoming HIV infected - or of having to care for someone who has HIV/AIDS. The disease is transmitted largely through men and sex workers to women and their children. Women shoulder the burden of care for people with HIV/AIDS which, in turn, leads to more hardship. Paying for medical treatment is identified as one of the highest causes of poverty in Cambodia.

Many women continue to carry painful memories from the Khmer Rouge throughout their daily lives as well as the desperation created by poverty.

Please support us in our endeavour to provide an opportunity for economic development that will help these women and their families break the cylce of poverty.

Visit Fair Fabric to learn more about Cambodian women.

Buying fair trade silk from Cambodia helps women who are suffering so much. The silk co-operative provide a strong base on which to build a successful and sustainable business - as well as the pyscho-social support so important in Cambodia. Women employed at and supported by these co-operatives have found increased confidence, improved livelihoods and feel empowered to plan and make decisions for themselves and the future.

The funds raised through selling silk products help to run the following projects to make a difference to real lives:

Literacy
This is the initial program the women enroll in when coming to the co-operative, and it runs part time for one year. After successful completion women are able to move on to the vocational training. All of the training is provided free of charge to encourage and make it possible for women to attend. The co-operative provides a small living and food allowance for enrolled women. Some women are offered a bicycle to improve access.

The literacy program is taught by trained teachers to educate women in reading, writing and math, up to grade 4. This level gives many women the ability to perform more functions outside the home and to participate in the community. Most of the women that have completed this course now work in silk production, writing records, calculations and reports on the silk production. Many are now reading novels and share gossip magazines at lunch time! Some have taken up further education in English and math and share their knowledge with family members. Breaking this cycle of illiteracy improve lives, opportunities and has a long term beneficial effect.

Health
In Camdodia, women often do not have easy access to health facilities. Health education is not a priority for the rural family, and this lack of knowledge can have powerful consequences. Some personal health issues, particularly for women, are generally not even discussed because of cultural guidelines.

This lack of education creates further vulnerability even with the simplest of health issues. Health knowledge in rural areas is even more at risk with information transferred from generation to generation occasionally with a lack of real knowledge and some of the simplest problems become worse because of wrong diagnosis, cultural beliefs or mismanagement of medication.

As many families in the Cambodian provinces are unable to afford lengthy expensive treatments or even get access to health care workers, some common health concerns can be better prevented or treated with a little knowledge.

Health programs teach women about primary health, including nutrition, hygiene, birth control, HIV/AIDS prevention, prevention and treatment of common health problems (diarrhea, malaria, dengue fever etc) and the use of basic medicines.

This education teaches women how to take better care of themselves, their children and share the knowledge with their loved ones resulting in healthier and happier families. These lessons also give the women an opportunity to share experiences and issues, finding they have much in common with their counterparts, thereby creating an ease of communicating health concerns, empowering women to understand their own bodies and take care of their own well being.

Any health issues needing attention for the women or children or family members at the silk co-operative provides direct and practical assistance, whilst also using the experience to increase further health knowledge and solutions.

Vocational Training - Weaving and Sewing
After the women's successful completion of the literacy and health education program they are able to move onto vocational training that demonstrates and teaches all aspects of silk weaving, from preparation to final product presentation. After completion most of the women are filtered into employment at SWDC at our mekong blue production center. This type of vocational training has a very positive impact on the women's future as textile weaving is currently a highly transferable and employable skill in the South East Asian region.

The weaving training runs for 6 months fulltime, the sewing training runs for 1 year part time. All of the training is provided free of charge.

The women who complete the training are then evaluated and offered to apply for positions at the co-operative in the skill they show most confidence in. On the job training is ongoing and new skills are developed over time.

The program consists of the following courses:
Getting to understand silk - through washing and handling unprocessed silk, separating and spinning silk into thread.
Preparing silk - dying, setting dyes, drying silk, a few women with math skill are chosen to specialize in dying and color mixing and more advanced dying techniques.
Setting up the loom - preparing the warp, folding warp onto beam, preparing and threading the reed, preparing the heddle.
Silk weaving - preparing the weft, using the shuttle, weaving different silk thicknesses, weaving modern and traditional patterns, including Khmer Ikat and patterns.
Sewing - measuring, developing and making patterns, cutting silk, sewing, tailoring and finishing.
Quality Control - preparing product for sale: washing, ironing, labeling and packaging.

80% of the women who complete the training are provided with employment at the co-operative in their learnt vocational skill. This employment improves income generation and livelihoods. Silk production provides women with confidence and physical evidence of their hard work and skill.

Visit Fair Fabric to buy silk products made by these women, and help to make a real difference to their lives.