Spotlight on silk

You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear, or so the old Scottish proverb goes. But who knew that you can make a fetching silk purse – or, in my case, a funky felted lampshade – from silkworm spew and fluffy merino fibres rubbed together between two bits of plastic bubble wrap?

Beautiful things often have insalubrious beginnings, and none more so than delicate strands of silk. When the Scots first coined their famous proverb in 1699, they probably had no idea how silk was made, for a lady pig’s hairy lugs are silkworms.