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From caterpillar to couture, Devon textile designer Jane Deane goes to extraordinary lengths to source her raw materials.

A spinner, weaver and dyer for many years, Jane now rears her own silkworms to add an exclusive touch to her designer scarves.

"It's not unique," said Jane. "But it is pretty unusual.

"A lot of people keep silkworms because they are interested in insects. There are only two or three other people that I know of in the UK who keep them because of the fibre."

Jane spinning some thread

Jane, from Tavistock, uses the hand-spun silk thread from her colony of silkworms as an inlay in a range of silk scarves.

"The scarves are woven largely from commercial silk, with hand-spun inlays made where possible from home produced silk," said Jane.  

"It's an accent really, only about 3% of the silk I use is from my own home reared silkworms. There's a different quality to the silk, people look at them and say what's that."

The silkworm is the larva or caterpillar of the domesticated silk moth. It's the world's only truly domesticated insect, having been bred and selected for thousands of years, mainly for the quality of its thread.

The end result is a highly efficient machine which turns leaves into silk, but in its current form, the worm is unable to survive in the wild.

A Mulberry silk moth

"One of my interests is the mulberry silk moth - which produces the high quality white silk. Because they've been bred in captivity for thousands of years - they don't see and they don't fly very well.

"I also enjoy working with the wild species of silkmoth. The silk is not of such high quality but compensates by having more character than the mulberry silk.

"The adults are not equipped with working mouths, and since they cannot eat, they die soon after mating. Their entire life cycle takes about six to eight weeks.

"It's true of all silk moths species, once they've emerged they don't eat, they hang around for a few days, they mate, lay their eggs and then die."

During their one-month larval life, silkworms will increase their body size by 10,000 times.

A pupa in an open cocoon

After four weeks of voracious eating, each worm will spin a cocoon composed of up to a mile of unbroken silk fibre.

"They start off as tiny eggs, which hatch into small caterpillars," explained Jane.

"They eat astonishing quantities of food and shed their skin five times.

"They get bigger each time, eventually when they reach maturity, they start extruding a very fine silk thread - at that point it's a kind of gummy liquid."

Unlike most commercial producers, Jane always lets the moths emerge from the cocoon, live and die as they would in nature.

Hand-spun silk yarn

The amount of silk they produce varies from year to year. So far 2008 has not been a good year and quite a lot of Jane's caterpillars have died.

"You need to keep them cool over winter as eggs or cocoons and bring them out when the trees come into leaf.

"They lay hundreds of eggs, but because life is hazardous only a few get through to the final stage. 

"How well they do depends on the weather, 2007 was hot at the right time and my silkworms produced fairly substantial amounts of silk."

Jane runs workshops and exhibits her creations around the South West of England.