Reeled yarn is not yet a saleable product. Re-reeling cleans it, hanks and books make it transportable, and the cocoons that could never be reeled at all still have a market of their own.
Re-reeling and packing
- Re-reeling. Rewind onto a standard reel of about 150 cm circumference, five or six ends at a time, at uniform speed and tension. Thin places, broken threads and entangled mass are removed at this stage — it is the quality checkpoint, not merely a transfer.
- Hanks and books. Twist the hank on itself and fold into spirals; pack skeins into 2 kg and 5 kg books for transport.
Ghicha and by-grade yarn
Pierced, flimsy, double and stained cocoons are the raw material for muga ghicha, the traditional hand-spun yarn. Sorting the harvest into reeling and non-reeling grades is value recovery, not rejection — the 20 % flimsy fraction of a typical harvest still earns about ₹ 400 per thousand cocoons.
In the one-acre muga model, 80 % of the 48,000 cocoons harvested sell as reeling grade at
₹ 5 each and the remaining 20 % as flimsy at ₹ 0.70 each — ₹ 6,720
of revenue that would otherwise be discarded. See
Economics of Muga Culture.