The silk reeling was done mid Jan. of 2006.
I found out what NOT TO DO.
I'm going to tell you so you will be able to do it
right the first (or second) time around.
NECESSITY IS THE MOTHER OF INVENTION
OR use what you have and hope like crazy it works,
OR in my case, go with the flow and kick yourself later.
I hope you were at the silkworm page first.
That delt with sericulture and cocoons,
cause this is what I did with the cocoons that
I raised and the ones that I ended up buying on ebay.
First of all you need something to soak the cocoons in.
Something that will keep the water hot.
I used a "Hot Pot" that I got a few years ago.
It has several settings and can get up to boiling. I kept it a little below the boil point.
The cocoons were soaked in the pot of hot water
until the sericin was softened and the silk filament was released.
I used a small art brush to find the silk filaments
and gather them up to reel.
Not all threads are the main one as I found out.
You can see the fine strands of silk streching
from the pot to the banana holder. The hook
on the holder sort of helped keep the threads together.
My silk reeler was something I made a lot of years
ago for winding wet yarn on to dry.
I found out that yarn dried better if hung
outside with a weight to keep it tight. I fished it
out of the shed and cleaned it up.
It worked quite well as long as there were multiple threads.
None of the information I found
really stated how long it took to reel silk.
The thing to remember is that
a silk filiment can be up to 3,000 inches long
that is over 83 yards.If you plan to reel better plan on making a day out of it.
The plastic fork I used to fish the dead pupae out
of the water when the silk was all reeled.
By the way they eat these things in Japan.
YUCK!!
This is as far as I got on the reeling for now. I think I will have to wet the silk to unreel it.
Using a ball winder.
Not adviseable. The filament is too fine and wet silk that is not degummed is like glue. I had to cut the silk off the butcher paper and it was like a heavy piece of parchment. I did manage to get a few small hanks of thread before I gave up. The ends absolutely vanished. I have a layer of silk under the paper and I wet it before trying to unwind. This worked a little better I managed to get a fairly good length of fiber. It is very fine. Guess I will have to get the KoolAid back out. 
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