Oct 14, 2009: Rare Silk

[xoxoxoBruce]

Look at this beautiful, 11ft by 4ft, rare silk textile, on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.



It's not old, it's brand new, although it took a bunch of people 4 years to create.
It's rare because the silk came from these guys...



Each Golden Orb spider, in Madagascar, donated about 80ft of filament per 'milking' (my term), and it takes them a couple weeks to recover.

Peers came up with the idea of weaving spider silk after learning about the French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1880s and 1890s. Camboué built a small, hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once, without harming them.

“Simon managed to build a replica of this 24-spider-silking machine that was used at the turn of the century,” said Nicholas Godley, who co-led the project with Peers. As an experiment, the pair collected an initial batch of about 20 spiders. “When we stuck them in the machine and started turning it, lo and behold, this beautiful gold-colored silk started coming out,” Godley said.

The textile weighs 2.6 pounds, and it takes about 14,000 spiders to produce 1oz of thread, which means... Oww, my head hurts.
But of course, some spiders were caught and 'milked' more than once, over the years.

Unlike silk worms, which are easy to raise in captivity, spiders have a habit of chomping off each other’s heads when housed together.
To get as much silk as they needed, Godley and Peers began hiring dozens of spider handlers to collect wild arachnids and carefully harness them to the silk-extraction machine. “We had to find people who were willing to work with spiders,” Godley said, “because they bite.”

Oh, and they only produce silk during the rainy season, October to June.
Hey , the season is just starting, anybody want a job?

link