The silk from the golden orb spider is one of the strongest threads in the world, five or six times stronger than steel.  It is also beautiful and notoriously difficult to extract, let alone turn into beautiful tapestries.  The material is so difficult to work with that, until now, no one had ever managed to produce a piece of hand-woven, brocaded textile from their silk until now.  The brainchild of businessman Simon Peers and designer Nicholas Godley, the 11-foot-long golden-yellow tapestry is the first-ever made entirely from spider silk.

The material had been harvested in limited amounts previously, but the product of Peers and Godley’s labor took an entire team of spider handlers, over a million spiders, and lots and lots of time and attention.  Each golden orb spider can only produce a limited amount of silk per day, and if left alone, the spiders tend to either attack and kill one another or disappear into the cooking pots of the locals, who believe eating the fried spiders is good for throat ailments.  The silk is also very difficult to obtain as the spiders won’t give off threads in winter and if conditions are not exactly right, the silk is worthless.

A million spiders and an entire team of handlers took years to make that fabric above, but it’s pretty gorgeous.  I wonder if you can touch it if you go see the exhibit at the American Museum of Natural History.  Wouldn’t that be awesome if you could?

Tags: spider silk cloth, spiders, textiles, American Museum of Natural History, Simon Peers, Nicholas Godley, golden orb spider, Madagascar, cloth made of spider silk

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