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A woman in my local spinning and weaving club took up silk worms as a hobby, spent about 6 months from beginning to end and wound up (lol) with a ~ square foot patch to hang on the wall. Pretty impressive conversion from tree leaves to silk when you think about it.

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Me and my kids are still trying to figure out how to scale it up. We thought we had the right sort of mulberries... first batch starved. Then we tried Samia instead of Bombyx, but every single package would arrive damaged and empty. We've got mulberry seeds going, and we're getting some cuttings for this spring. Even then, you need something like 250+ cocoons for an ounce of silk, so we're not expecting much at first.

Wait, why are your packets of seed arriving empty all the time? Customs declaring them exotic and harmful? Mulberry mobsters? Moths in the delivery chain?

My guess would be that they came from Amazon

Silkworm eggs, not seed. Got my refunds. No clue. Domestic, wasn't shipped from overseas or anything, and if it was customs they usually send something saying that they're confiscating the shipment (or so I'm led to believe, I don't often try to smuggle anything). It was a bit weird. They were pretty good about delivering the empty ripped envelopes though.

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