Making silk duvets

The weaving of raw silk stems from an ancestral tradition. It requires real expertise and uses skills and techniques that have been passed from mother to daughter for many centuries.

Our comforters are fabricated to the highest standards, making sure that you will acquire a high-end product that has been made with care and in accordance with the "Rules of the Craft."

But before turning to traditional manufacturing techniques, let us pause a moment and talk about the quality and the origin of the raw material.

The best silk

As with comforters made with duck or goose down, there are different qualities of silk. They are obviously not all the same. Some manufacturers use poor quality cocoons or, even worse, only the silk floss, which is made up of waste resulting from the carding of the silk.

Our comforters are filled with superior quality grade A cocoons from silk moths that have been fed exclusively with white mulberry leaves. The leaf of the white mulberry allows them to produce silk to exceptional quality.

Silk farming & working with cocoons

After 5 to 6 weeks, the silkworms fed exclusively with white mulberry leaves turn into silk cocoons. Cocoons are harvested at the end of summer. First soaked in boiling water to remove bacteria, they are then opened so that only silk fibers remain. The silk is then left to dry for several weeks on long wooden sticks in a ventilated room.

Next begins the work of carding the silk, which results in long, thin white fibers. Once stretched, these fibers will give our product exceptional flexibility and covering capacity.

Layering

The picture below shows the most crucial stage of silk comforter production. It consists of stretching and evenly spreading a large number of layers of silk over the entire surface of the quilt.

These long, tangled silk fibers are then joined with a stitch, allowing the silk to breathe and to acquire the best thermal properties.

The result of this long, manual process has nothing to do with the largely machine-sewn silk comforters that are made of raw material of much lower quality.

Picture showing the manufacture of silk comforters by the successive stretching of thin layers of long fibers of grade A raw silk.

Making the comforter's envelope-style cover

The only step left is to insert the layers of silk into a carefully-made cotton cover. This delicate operation also requires special care and real expertise. The cover is then sewn with no overstitching to avoid thermal bridging.

Here again, the choice of production technique ensures a high quality comforter that is much warmer and softer than one whose short fiber filling must be maintained with a lot of overstitching, making stiffening the comforter and greatly impairing its covering capacity.

Because we are confident and proud of the high quality of each of our comforters, we have included a small zipper on the side that lets you see the silk of which it is made!