How to make cactus silk threads?

I found a site where you can find the method how Moroccan people make the cactus silk thread. This is the link:

http://craftsoftheworldonline.blogspot.com/2013/01/vegetable-silk-also-known-as-sabra.html

They have a webshop, too, where you can find some items of cactus silk.

"Also known as Cactus silk, Sabra silk is a natural fiber harvested from sustainable sources of Saharan Aloe Vera Cactus (the Aloe Vera plant being part of the Agave family).

The fabric is a 100% vegetable silk blend of extracted filaments from the aloe cactus grown in Morocco. It is sought for its quality, strength and beauty since millennia. The process to produce sabra silk has not changed for centuries. Once the Cactus plant is collected from the long agave plants, the long spiky leaves are crushed and the fibres washed and hammered, then the leaves are soaked in water to separate the fibres & filaments and then these are spun and woven to make "silk thread" which are then dyed in different colours. The textile produced has a high elasticity and this makes Sabra-Silk free of wrinkles.

You might have come across - when walking through the narrow lanes of the Medina in Marrakech –men threading fine, almost invisible, fibers on spools. These are then twisted into thread by small battery powered twisters and tacked along the walls of the medina while they were being created. The colourful threads of the cactus silk are then sold in spools."

 

The Price

Somebody asked me the price, so

10 g silk               12.50 USD

If you buy at least 1 kg, the discount is 20%., so 1 kg silk is 1.000 USD
If you buy the whole 78 kg, the discount is 40%, so the price is 39.000 USD.

How many?

One of my friends who have read this blog asked me how many spools we have. So there are 2 kg spools, 1 kg spools and 10g spools.


Colour                             2kg                                   1kg                                   10g

Black                                  2                                                                              100  

White                                 1                                                                                99

Gold                                                                                                                    100

Old Gold                                                                      4                                     100

Beige                                                                            6

Orange                                                                                                                100

Blue                                                                              7

Royal Blue                                                                    3

Light Blue                                                                     3

Silverblue                                                                                                           100

Skyblue                                                                                                              100

Dark Blue                                                                                                           100

Eggplant                                                                       7

Cyclamen                                                                     2                                    100

Pink                                                                             7                                    100

Powderpink                                                                  3

Mallow                                                                                                               100

Red                                                                               7                                      99

Cherry                                                                                                                 100

Bordeaux                                                                                                            100

Olive                                                                             3

Grass Green                                                                  3

Sea Green                                                                                                           100

Turquoise                                                                                                            100

Benetton Green                                                                                                   100

Dark Green                                                                                                         100

Our Journey to Morocco

Two years ago me and my friends traveled to Morocco, Marrakesh. There - in the Souque - we saw a lot of goods made of cactus silk. The colours of the cactus silk threads were vibrant, bright and vivid. So we were overjoyed. I so wanted those amazing silk threads, to make some handcrafts of these. 

My friends also wanted the thread because of some business, in Europe or in America there aren't any of these kinds. So we bought the 100% moroccan cactus silk threads: in 16 colours, in various sizes of spools. Yes, we bought 100 kg!!!

I knitted a royal blue casual pulli but that was a very hard work, I had to use 12 filaments of silk to make one thread to knit. But the pulli is wonderful.

Nevertheless now I know that this silk is for embroidery and tapestry. 

But we cannot sell these silk in commercial ways in the market because the spools aren't standards. 

4 thread makes a "cord" that is spinned up to the spool. It is not supposed to be for machine use, instead for handcraft, patchworking, needlework, handweaving,, knitting, tapestry etc. For machine works it is only applicable in spools!   

So now we have 80 kg of these pure cactus silk threads, and we want to sell these to people who are able to make embroidery or weaving. 

The threads are available to buy in ebay, but we'll sell these in our webshop-site too. 

If you are interested in our goods, please check us out in ebay, or go to our website.

To taste, these are the muster of the 1 kg spools (the Black and the White silk are in 2 kg/spool, too):

And we have some other kind of coloured silk in small spools, these are 10g/spool:

The product sepc: 830 g/10.000 m, strength 207,5 DPF, one 10g spool is about 75 m in length of 4 filaments (total length is 300m), a 1 kg spool is around 7.500 m in length of 4 filaments. The small hank is about 10g in weight.

The goods are in Hungary, Europe.