The phenomena of creep, stress relaxation, and inverse relaxation/stress recovery were observed for mulberry and tasar silk. Instantaneous extension and secondary creep are both higher for tasar than for mulberry. The magnitude of inverse relaxation increases with the increase in peak tension and reduction in retraction for both varieties of silk. The extent of inverse relaxation was found to reduce because of cycling stressing. (c) 2006 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.