This article is targeted to felters that use silk in their felted creations.
I constantly walk through thrift stores and resale shops just touching fabrics, clothes and scarves to test myself on determining if the piece is silk or manmade material – polyester.
Some polyester pieces look and feel so much like silk that I am constantly fooled. Of course the foolproof way to know if the item is silk is with the presence of a fabric label. But many items that I’m looking at in resale / art / thrift stores are missing their fabric content tabs. So what if you are in one of these shops and the item is missing the tag? You’ll have to take a chance on it and hopefully it’s inexpensive since you are already at a discount store. Once you get home use this method to test the item.
Cut a small swatch from the item and perform the burn test. Do this outside and preferably with a helper. I have done this test by myself. Grasp the swatch with needle nose or other pliers. Just make sure to keep the flame away from your body and light the swatch with a match.
It doesn’t have to burn long and there is no need to burn the entire swatch.
Once your swatch is cool, touch the burnt part. If the burnt part just dissolves to ash then you’ve got silk! If the swatch portion burned is hard to the touch or curled up ten it’s a manmade fabric and likely polyester. The photo in this post shows what burned polyester looks like.
This same test can be used to test if an item is wool.
Happy Felting!