Spider Silk Textile June 12, 2010

A spectacular and extremely rare textile, woven from golden-colored silk thread produced by more than one million spiders in Madagascar, is on display in the Museum's Grand Gallery. This magnificent contemporary textile, measuring 11 feet by 4 feet, took four years to make using a painstaking technique developed more than 100 years ago. Producing the spider silk--the only example of its kind displayed anywhere in the world--involved the efforts of 70 people who collected spiders daily from webs on telephone wires, using long poles. These spiders were all collected during the rainy season (the only time when they produce silk) from Antananarivo, the capital of Madagascar, and the surrounding countryside. These giant spider webs are a well-known feature of the capital, and frequently surprise international visitors. A dozen more people were needed to draw the silk from the spiders with hand-powered machines, with each spider producing about 80 feet of silk filament. This intricately-patterned spider silk features stylized birds and flowers and is based on a weaving tradition known as lamba Akotifahana from the highlands of Madagascar. In this unique lamba cloth, the individual threads used for weaving are made by twisting 96 to 960 individual spider silk filaments together.