Venice, Lucca and Florence became renowed centers of silk weaving starting in the fourteenth century. These cities specialized in heavy brocades and patterned velvets, which were exported to the whole of northern Europe. Silk fiber as it comes from the cocoon is coated with a protective layer called silk gum, or sericin. The silk gum is dull and stiff. There are many methods of removing some, or all, of the gum.
Silk made from wild silkworms is called tussah silk.
The natural color of tussah silk is usually not white, but shades of pale beige, brown, and grey. It is usually coarser than cultivated silk. Reeled silk or Thrown silk is the term for silk fiber that is unwound from the silkworm cocoon. Spun silk is several fibers of silk spun into narrow threads, often from the broken cocoons from which the moths have already emerged. Noil is the term for the shorter fibers of silk left after the longer silk fibers have been combed out or reeled off the cocoon.