PHOTOGRAPHED FROM OUR STOCK
The cloth behind these terms
Unretouched photographs from our own floor. Colour varies between dye lots; the swatch card is the only reliable reference.
BUYING SILK · 100% MULBERRY SILK · FROM A CHINESE MILL
Weaving, dyeing and finishing under one roof — and the two things that follow from it.
A silk fabric manufacturer is not just a supplier with a lower price. It is the party that decides the sett, the twist and the finishing route, and therefore the party that can answer why a cloth behaves the way it does. When the mill and the seller are the same entity, a complaint goes to the people who can fix it.
What we control in-house is the weave, the dyeing and the finishing. What that buys you in practice: the width and the momme tolerance are ours to state, the lab dip is dyed in the same house that will dye the bulk, and a repeat order can be matched against a retained sample.
This sounds minor and it is the single most common cause of a dye lot not matching. A dip dyed in a sample lab and bulk dyed in a production house will drift.
If a cloth needs more body, the answer is often a sett or a weft change rather than a different fabric. That conversation is only possible with the mill.
A short roll or a shade step is an internal issue, not a claim against a third party.
| Stage | In-house | Why it matters to you |
|---|---|---|
| Weaving | Yes | Width, sett and weight tolerance are set by us |
| Dyeing | Yes | Lab dip and bulk come out of the same dye house |
| Finishing | Yes | Sand-washing and softening are our route, not a subcontractor's |
| Digital printing | Yes | Strike-off and bulk on the same machines |
| Reeling / raw silk | Purchased | We buy mulberry raw silk to specification and test inbound |
The most useful question to ask a mill is what it does not do. Any operation that weaves, dyes and finishes in-house will also have weights, structures or finishes it sends out, and the boundary is where quality problems hide. Ours is stated above: reeling is purchased, everything after the loom is ours.
Development and production are different disciplines and often different people. A mill that is excellent at a three-metre development sample can still be slow at a three-hundred-metre repeat, because the second needs process control rather than skill. If you are placing a programme, ask what happens on run two, not what happened on the sample.
These search phrases all land here because they mean the same thing:
If you were looking for a different commercial question, the wholesale page covers programmes and the ready-stock page covers what is on the shelf right now.
We are the manufacturer. Weaving, dyeing, finishing and digital printing are done in our own operation under the legal entity Predatex Silk Co., Ltd., trading as IM Silk.
The catalogue runs from about 6 momme for the lightest gauzes and batistes to 40 momme for heavy charmeuse and duchess satin, with heavier couture weights woven to order. Each family has its own range; the family page states what is on the shelf and what is dyed to order.
We supply fabric, not finished garments, so private label applies to the cloth: your colour, your design, your width, your packing. Tell us what you need on the label and the roll and we will confirm what we can do.
Usually yes. Send a physical sample and we will identify the structure, the weight and the finish, then quote against a reproduction. A photograph is not enough — fibre, sett and finish cannot be read reliably from an image.
Custom structures carry a loom setup and are quoted with the quantity stated. If the volume does not justify a loom, the same effect can often be reached by changing the weight or the finish on an existing base.
PHOTOGRAPHED FROM OUR STOCK
Unretouched photographs from our own floor. Colour varies between dye lots; the swatch card is the only reliable reference.
Tell us the quantity and the colour and we will quote it with a confirmed dispatch date.
