roriferas:fatbottompurls:Rare spider silk textile“The four metre long woven textile was made from th
roriferas:fatbottompurls:Rare spider silk textile“The four metre long woven textile was made from the silk of more than a million female Golden Orb spiders collected in the highlands of Madagascar.It took 80 people five years to collect the spiders, and the naturally golden hand-woven brocaded textile took over four years to create.According to experts at the Victoria and Albert Museum, spider’s silk has not been woven since 1900, when a textile was created for the Paris Exposition Universelle - but that no longer survives. This will be the first time spider silk has been exhibited in Europe since.The earliest recorded weave using the silk of spiders dates from 1709, made by a Frenchman, Francois-Xavier Bon de Saint Hilaire, who successfully produced gloves and stockings and supposedly a full suit of clothes for King Louis XIV.Later, in the early nineteenth century, Raimondo de Termeyer, a Spaniard working in Italy, produced stockings for the Emperor Napoleon and a shawl for his first wife, Empress Josephine.To create the textiles, spiders are collected each morning and harnessed in specially conceived ‘silking’ contraptions. Trained handlers extract the silk from 24 spiders at a time.Unlike mulberry silk from silkworms, in which the pupa is killed in its cocoon, the spiders are returned to the wild at the end of each day.After ‘silking’, the silk is taken on cones to the silk weaving workshop where skilled weavers have mastered the special tensile properties of the silk.In the so-called Malagasy textile, each warp is made from 96 spun strands of spider silk and each brocading weft has 10 of those threads together – so 960 strands in total.On average, 23,000 spiders yield around 1 ounce of silk. It is a highly labour intensive undertaking, making these textiles extraordinarily rare and precious objects.”The piece for the Paris Exposition was produced (by means of Malagasy labor) through a process developed by Paul Camboué, who was a French Jesuit missionary in Madagascar. It sounds like this new textile was produced using a similar method. Camboué attempted to develop an industrial system for collecting spider web from golden orb weavers using a machine that was called “The Guillotine” (or it is called that in the September 1900 issue of Scientific American, anyway, in an article on the topic).These are the spider butts only. The spider faces are on the other side. You can get an idea of how this works (and why it’s called a “guillotine”) by looking at the empty slots in the bottom row. The Scientific American article describes the process thus:In the first place, thespiders are brought from the countryin light baskets by [Malagasy] women onthe very day upon which the silk is to be reeled. Itis important, in fact, that they shall be left shut up together for but a short time, since they have an unfortunate habit of devouring one another, and the riskwould be run of eventually finding nothing but thesingle survivor! The operator then proceeds as inreeling silk, that is to say, he unites several threads andtwists them at the same time that theyare reeled, so as to produce a thread ofthe desired size. […] As for the spiders, they are placed in aframe in groups of one or two dozen. Itis important not to mutilate or woundthem during the operation, since theyare capable of being submitted to four orfive successive reelings in a month, representing about four thousand yards ofthread. […] Theirlegs are turned back upon the corseletand their abdomen emerges from the sideon which the unwinding and twisting ofthe thread is done. The [Malagasy] girls,in performing this delicate operation,touch the end of the abdomen of the prisoners with the finger and then gentlywithdraw the latter, thus carrying along,in a single bundle, the twelve or twenty-four threads to a hook that unites theminto a single one, whence they afterwardstart for the bobbin upon which they areto be wound. (Source)Jstor wrote a nice little article about spider-silk weaving generally for their Daily publication, linked here. -- source link