By LAWRENCE TAN

Textile maker Simon Peers and fashion designer Nicholas Godley forked out half a million dollars from their own pockets to create an 11 feet by 4 feet tapestry that could be one of the very first in the world – one that is woven from spider silk.

The golden-colored silk brocade, featuring stylized birds and flower patterns, has been made from silk harnessed from more than one million female golden orb spiders in Madagascar.

It required the efforts of more than 80 people to collect the spiders, harness the silk, and then weaving the silk using a century-old Madagascan technique into the final tapestry – a process which took four years to complete.

The earliest record of an attempt to weave a textile from spider silk was attributed to French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué in the 1880s though his efforts were largely unsuccessful.

Golden orb spiders, famous for their outrageously huge golden webs some of which can span a one-lane road, are found in the tropics, and their webs are common sights in Madagascar, hanging between telephone and electrical wires.

Unlike silkworms, spiders are rarely raised in captivity for silking because they will just end up eating one another. However, it has been found that spider silk has a much higher strength-to-weight ratio, compared to steel, and besides it is also highly elastic.

In an interview with US-based National Public Radio, Peers said: “The first panel that we wove, we were quite stunned by the fact that it sounded a bit like guitar strings, pinging like metallic guitar strings. I mean, it is a very, very unusual material."

This beautiful spider silk tapestry is now on display at the American Museum of Natural History.

Images taken from the American Museum of Natural History

via NPR