A Genetically-Engineered Spider Silk Scarf
Sruli Recht, the Reyjavik-based industrial designer with a penchant for the unusual, may have topped himself. His ATOR scarf, made of spider silk, was created with the help of both a spider and a goat:"Our knit originates from the silk gland DNA of a spider, carefully placed in the milk ducts of a goat. A single filament is reeled out of the goat millimetres at a time to produce the most unobtainable fibre in the world." "It takes several weeks to hand-loom the filament into this fabric quality, a further week gently coaxing the textile into the knotted web of this ghostly veil. [The scarf is] is woven, its proteins color treated with hot acid, then cured. After cutting it is twisted into a Mbius strip, and a flat felled seam is backstitched by hand with lengths of the same yarn, a holistic approach just short of felting, closing the loop." "The edges are folded and pressed with agonizing slowness, before being bound with a Japanese thermally activated tape, a frosted, almost invisible finish." "ATOR is made from one of the rarest multi-hyphenated materials in the world genetically engineered spider-goat silk filament, hand-loomed, hand-dyed, hand-stitched, and hand-bound."Considering that Recht could only get enough material to produce three of these, the 2,200 (USD $2,337) price doesn't seem that high.