It is hard for us at J&O Fabric to think of spiders as anything other than the creepy crawly things that give us goosebumps. However, upon finding out that more than a million Golden Orb spiders were used to create a 13-foot-long silk textile masterpiece, we had to give the spindly legged buggers their due.
To make the fabric, the spiders were collected each morning and put into ‘harnesses’ that linked them to specially made machines that would extract their silk. At the end of each session, the spiders were returned to the wild. This is a sharp contrast to the fate of silkworms whose pupa are killed in their cocoons to produce commonly used silk.
