Textile artist Karen Selk has spent decades traveling, spinning, writing, and teaching about silk. We are delighted to share a look inside her recent book, In Search of Wild Silk: Exploring a Village Industry in the Jungles of India. In these brief excerpts, Karen explains what eri silk is and how it is produced. If you’re interested in gaining a deeper understanding of wild silk, we recommend the book as a whole.—Handwoven Editors
The fertile river valleys of Assam have attracted waves of migrants from dozens of ethnic groups over thousands of years. Most of Assam’s Indigenous people have raised eri silkworms and spun and woven the cloth longer than anyone can remember. About 132,000 families in Assam produce 96 percent of the world’s eri.
Eri, the third type of silkworm included in Vanya (wild) silk, has been a bit of a dull cousin to glossy muga, tasar, and white mulberry silk. Unlike tasar and muga, it isn’t even wild. Assamese women raise festoons of multicolored domesticated eri silkworms on their verandas and rearing houses. Compared to raising tasar and muga, eri is easier and more lucrative. It is named after its favorite food, castor, Ricinus communis, a flowering plant best known for castor oil. Era or eranda are Assamese names for castor. Depending on the eco-race, eri cocoons are either creamy white or red brick. The red color is fugitive and fades to a light beige when the sericin is removed.
Piloni Marak, of the matriarchal Garo tribe, raises eri in her new rearing house. She holds a bamboo rod with eri caterpillars munching on bouquets of tapioca leaves. By overlapping her crops she can harvest thirteen times a year.
The women’s crops are small, something they take care of during their spare time, like keeping chickens. Traditionally, they raise eri for the protein-rich pupae, which are considered a delicacy. Some say that fried eri pupae taste like prawns. Rearers get more money for pupae than for silk from the cocoons.
Eri is known as “poor man’s silk” because it has been raised by the poor tribal people (respectfully called Adivasi) of Assam and is less costly than tasar, muga, and white (mulberry) silk. Customarily, village women use a takli (drop spindle) to spin eri yarn, producing only a small amount in a day.
It takes about 1,300 cocoons to produce 1 lb. (454 g) of takli-spun eri yarn. Eri cocoons come in red and white. They are not constructed of one continuous filament like tasar and muga. Instead, eri silkworms spin intermittently, going back and forth between spinning and resting. This creates an open-ended cocoon made of many shorter lengths of filament that cannot be reeled. It is spun, much the same as spinning cotton.
Eri fiber is finer than tasar or muga and creates a softer, loftier yarn. Takli spinning is a slow process. Taking advantage of every spare moment, many women continue to spin eri on taklis as they walk through the village or rest in the shade of a thatched lean-to while visiting with a weaver or other spinners.
• If you’d like to weave with eri silk we suggest the Sugar Plum Lace Scarf by Susan Du Bois and Robin Wilton, from the Spring 2025 issue of Handwoven.
• To learn more from Karen Selk about silk, including how reeled and spun silks are processed, why different grades of silk produce different textile effects, what peduncle silk is, and where tussah silks are grown and how they vary, take a look at her video mini-series.
Textile artist Karen Selk lives on an island in the Salish Sea off the coast of British Columbia, Canada. The serenity and beauty of island life inspire many hours in the studio creating art and writing. Learn more at karenselk.com.