Shaw Area Rugs
Real silk for shaw area rugs is produced as the cocoon covering of the silkworm. The shaw area rugs cocoon is spun by the silk moth caterpillar of a single silk fiber that can be up to several thousand feet in length. To harvest the shaw area rugs silk, completed cocoons are boiled or heated to kill the silkworms, then laboriously unwound into single fibers which are plied together and spun into thread or silk yarn.
Natural silk for shaw area rugs is a fibrous protein composed of a number of amino acids: glycine, alanine, serine, valine, tyrosine, glutamic acid, and others. Shaw area rugs silk is extremely high in tensile strength, exceeding that of nylon.
Silk is used to make shaw area rugs because dyed silk is a fiber with rich, saturated colors, and a distinctive, almost translucent luster. Artificial silk for shaw rugs is everything billed as silk that doesn't come from the silkworm cocoon.
Most often this means mercerized cotton; sometimes it means a manufactured fiber like rayon or a blend of chemically altered and manufactured shaw rugs fibers. It's not that artificial silk is intrinsically evil; it's just that the whole point of using artificial silk in shaw area rugs is to save the cost of real silk. It is not nice when this cheaper, artificial silk shaw area rug are misrepresented and sold for the price of real silk shaw area rugs.