Silk harvested from Golden Orb spiders go into a cape.

No Spiders Were Harmed in the Making of This Golden Silk Cape

The problem with silkworms is that they're single-serving workers—each worm only makes one cocoon. But spiders! Spiders are a renewable silky resource with each one capable of being "milked" of its thread every week. This incredible cape is comprised of the silk from more than a million wild Golden Orb spiders.

This cape is the brainchild of Simon Peers and Nicholas Godley. Workers collected wild Golden Orb spiders from the Madagascar highlands each day and placed them in a hand-operatd silk harvester that Peers and Godley had created on a 100-year-old design. Once the spider's silk had been extracted, the spider was released back into the wild. The spider's were not harmed and replenished their silk supplies in about a week. Over a million Golden Orb spiders were wrangled because their silk is naturally the golden sheen you see above—and because it takes 23,000 of them to make 28 grams of the stuff.

The cape, which is the world's largest piece of spider-silk cloth ever created, as well as a four-foot long shawl (apparently they had some silk left over) are currently on display at the V&A museum in London. Check out a video of the cape and the little—relative term—spiders responsible for it.

SRS