Spinning Gold from Spiders

It's beautiful, strong, and naturally produced. The catch is that it takes a million spiders to make.

From the NYT and Wired...

A rare textile goes on display today at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City.

To produce this unique golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot by 4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk existing in the world today.

By the end of the project, silk was extracted from more than 1 million female golden orb spiders, which are abundant throughout Madagascar and known for the rich golden color of their silk. Then an additional 12 people used hand-powered machines to extract the silk and weave it into 96-filament thread. Once the spiders had been milked, they were released back into the wild, where Godley said it takes them about a week to regenerate their silk...

...Part of the reason it’s so hard to generate spider silk in the lab is that it starts out as a liquid protein that’s produced by a special gland in the spider’s abdomen. Using their spinnerets, spiders apply a physical force to rearrange the protein’s molecular structure and turn it into solid silk.

An NPR segment on the spiders and the tapestry...