Sorry – Been a long break in Blog Updates and this one will not be very long. I wanted to just let everyone know that silk prices continue to climb.

The price that we pay for silk fabrics are directly related to the price of raw silk that is sourced primarily in China. I don’t want to bore you with the entire “silk fabric story” but I’ll give you a little background.

Like many larger drapery manufacturers, DrapeStyle imports the majority of our silk fabrics directly from mills in India. Most of the fabric mills in the US that were producing silks have all but vanished.

The silks that we purchase are woven or “spun” from raw silk that is produced by silk worms in China. You may remember studying the “Silk Road” in high school. The raw silk is shipped to India where it is spun into silk fabrics. From there the fabric is shipped all over the world. This is pretty much the fabric industry in a nutshell.

So here is where we run into some problems. Like any commodity such as corn, wheat or pork for that matter, raw silk is a natural product that is actually produced from silk worms. When the “crop” is good, pricing is low. Unfortunately for all of us who rely on Silk Fabrics the “crop” has been very bad for the last couple of years. The worms aren’t producing and, as a result, our silk pricing has more than doubled in the last 12-14 months.

We certainly hope that the pricing won’t stay this high for long. In the interim we will be bringing in some great new designs in Polyester (not your grandma’s polyester) and Linen.

Thanks for checking in with DrapeStyle!