This autumn an 11 foot by 4 foot piece of golden coloured fabric went on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York. It was created entirely from spiders' silk, collected from the Golden Orb spider of Madagascar. Under the guidanceof art historian Simon Peers, a group of locals collected around 3000 spiders each day from trees and telegraph poles. The spiders were then handled by a group of women weavers, who extracted the silk from the creatures' spinnerets onto a spool from where it was woven on a loom. It took four years to create the cloth, which is the largest known spider silk fabric in existence. However, this is certainly not the first attempt to harvest silk from spiders. Throughout history people have experimented withusing spider silk to create fabrics and clothing, yet most of these items have disappeared - are perhaps still waiting to be found in various museums and attics. Simon Peers himself was inspired by the story of a 19th century French missionary Jacob PaulCamboue, who had woven the silk of the Madagascan Golden Orb spider in to bed hangings. These were to be exhibited at the 1900 Paris Exposition, although I can find no record in the exhibition catalogue of any spider silk bed hangings. As perhaps befitssuch a magical material, the history of people weaving with spider silk is intertwined with myths and vague accounts. Having researched the notes, letters and sketches of some of these individuals, I would like to present a short history of some spidersilk collectors, the machines they created and the spiders that they worked with. The prints accompanying this story are my ojvn, created from the written descriptions or drawings I have found.
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