Thursday, May 10, 2012

Golden Girls






Ms Tagalong and Ms Mova were sat quietly in the garden last year chewing the fat, or possibly imbibing the wine, and bemoaning the dearth of golden orb spiders. A few years ago the gardens on Kings Road were gleaming in the early morning sunshine, dazzling the eyes with the diligence of the nightly toiling arachnids.



Well, Ms Tagalong has found out what has happened to them all.



Several years ago, well actually eight, the 1.2 million Madagascar Golden Orb spiders needed to create an ambitious work of art must have put out an SOS and asked for volunteers to immigrate to Madagascar to be part of this project.



Yes, the golden spider silk was carefully harvested and spun onto wooden bobbins. Talk about a labour of love. Simon Peers designed garments and Nicholas Godley, a designer-entrepreneur found the money. It has been done before, believe it or not, but over a century ago and as it took the silk from 23,000 spiders to weave 25 grammes of silk alone, and there are 1.5kg of silk in the shimmering cape it's not surprising that there are no plans afoot to put this silk into commercial production.





So if you do see some golden orbs this year, be thankful they have returned from their strenuous activities and guard them from someone like Mr Ideasman who could invent a silk extraction contraption so that Tighes Hill silk could become a world attraction!

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