Joshua Windus, reporter for The Americus Times-Recorder.

I heard they once made a dress from the silk of spiders. Great, big spiders on an island. Thankfully, living in the South, I don’t have to travel very far to come across freakishly huge spiders. We have banana spiders.

I remember one particular time I was walking through a trail. When you come to close to most bugs, they fly or skitter away, but one particularly large banana spider had the gaul to clabber closer as I walk past and stare. I think it must have mistook me for a Hobbit.

Well, either way, I didn’t get eaten, or even bitten, which is surprising considering the way I tried to silk them. First, I bought a Dewalt drill. I think took a Lego piece and attached it to a toy wheel hub, which formed a very crude spindle. Thankfully, the toy wheel hub had a groove that was just perfect for collecting the silk.

I found that by holding the spider in my gloved left hand, I could take a bit of silk from its rear and pull it out, attaching it to the Lego spindle and, by pulling the trigger on the drill, slowly unwind its precious silk. Strand after strand would emerge, uninterrupted, probably an adaption so that a falling spider could keep letting out thread as it went.

There was, however, one slight problem. The silk extracted in this manor is very slight. The support strands that regularly assaulted my face while on hikes were much thicker, wrapped multiple times. To actually make anything of it, dress or otherwise, would require a rope braider, which I was not industrious enough to contrive. But then, I almost didn’t have to. I noticed several webs had long support strands reaching across gaps between trees. Theses could also be wound up using the drill. Still, they weren’t quite thread strong, but close. A rope braiding machine might still be needed, but very few wrappings would be required. Unfortunately, I gave up the project. I still think I have a spindle of silk somewhere.