By RANDY KENNEDY


For anyone considering going into the business of manufacturing traditional textiles using the filaments extracted from the spinnerets of the golden orb spider of Madagascar, here are a few guidelines to keep in mind:

The largest spiders, the females, can grow to about the size of a small adult human hand.

Only the females produce the silk, which is renowned for both its striking saffron color and its tensile strength (five to six times stronger than steel by weight). They are notoriously cannibalistic and if left to their own devices will reduce the entire silk assembly line to arachnid carnage.

They don’t seem to want to work in the winter, and when it rains too much, their silk becomes viscous and cannot be used.

And if the spiders in the factory begin to disappear mysteriously, it might be because, in Madagascar, one of the poorest countries in the world, it is believed by some that eating these spiders, fried, is good for the throat or just good eating.

“There was, shall we say, a fairly steep learning curve,” said Simon Peers, a British art historian and textile expert who has lived in Madagascar for two decades. Five years ago Mr. Peers and Nicholas Godley, an American fashion designer also living on the island, began a partnership to do what no one had tried for more than 100 years: to harness spiders to make silk in the same way that silkworm cocoons have been used for thousands of years.

Recently at the American Museum of Natural History in New York, two women carefully pulled back a plastic covering to show what Mr. Peers and Mr. Godley - along with more than a million spiders and a dexterous team of intrepid Malagasy spider handlers - had accomplished. It is a 3.4-meterlong, brilliantly golden-hued cloth, the first recorded example of a handwoven brocaded textile made entirely from the silk of spiders, according to experts at the Museum of Natural History, where it will be on display for six months in the Grand Gallery.

Mr. Peers has worked for years to revive the weaving traditions for which Madagascar was once famous, and pieces made under his direction have found their way into the collections of the British Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, among others.

In the late 1890s in Madagascar, where fishermen had long used spider silk for rudimentary nets and line, a French technical-school official mounted another spider project, this time extracting the silk directly from living spiders to be twisted into threads. He was said to have harvested enough to fashion the hangings for a bed that was exhibited in 1900 in Paris, though the hangings no longer exist.

“And that,” Mr. Peers said, “was more or less the summit of everyone’s effort to that point - until we took it up again, like mad men.”

Mr. Peers, 51, and Mr. Godley, 40, put together an almost Victorian spidersilk harvesting operation that hired local people to comb the countryside with long bamboo poles, collecting live female spiders.

The spiders were taken to Mr. Godley, who set up a system in which workers, all women, would handle each spider, gently pulling out the thread that dangled from its spinnerets. (The spiders bite if provoked, but their bites are not dangerous.) The spider would then be placed in a harness, with 23 others, and sit as a spool tugged the rest of its web out in continuous threads that could sometimes stretch as long as 365 meters.

These 24 threads were then handtwisted into one and joined into 96-thread strands that served as the foundation of the textile.

“Not one thread ever broke on the loom - it’s that strong,” Mr. Godley said.

And what became of the spiders? While some died in production, Mr. Godley and Mr. Peers said they set up a system in which the spiders being used were released daily, and detailed spreadsheets were kept to chart the number of spiders used, their yield and the casualty rate.

“We have become sort of the defenders of these spiders, something we never thought we’d be,” said Mr. Godley, who calls himself a committed arachnophobe, but added, “They really are very regal-looking creatures.”

The two men say they hope that the textile, which cost more than half a million dollars to make, ends up being acquired by a public institution and displayed. (It is on loan to the American Museum of Natural History.)

“I hate sounding pretentious, but what we wanted to do here was produce something that was a work of art,” Godley said.

Mr. Godley said that he and Mr. Peers harbored few illusions, at least so far, about making a business of their gossamer obsession.

“If we were doing all of this to make money,” he said, “I could think of much, much easier ways to do it.”


The silk of the Madagascar golden orb spider is stronger than steel. Nicholas Godley, above left, and Simon Peers used the silk of more than a million spiders to make a 3.4-meter-long cloth.