"The Golden Thread"

[fiefoe]

For the most part, it's relaxing to learn the softer side of history through these stories about different fabrics (but definitely not the Scott Expedition one.) Kassia St. Clair must have had a good time deploying all the thread related puns.

• When we talk of lives hanging by a thread, being interwoven or being part of the social fabric; or if we want to help someone in danger of unravelling, or being torn away from their friends or family, we are part of a tradition that stretches back many thousands of years. Fabric and its component parts have long been a figurative stand-in for the very stuff of human life.
• Cloth gave humanity the ability to choose their own destiny. It’s believed that prehistoric cloth-making in temperate regions consumed more working hours than the making of pottery and food production combined.
• On the eve of the Industrial Revolution, the income they earned might represent a third of a poorer household’s income. This great economic shift, which in today’s collective imagination is so closely bound up with steel and coal, was in fact largely powered by textiles
• But getting it just right is vital: under-twisted yarn will be too weak, but if it is over-twisted it will buckle up on itself and be prone to wayward knots and tangles as you work with it.
• Further east, cotton textiles powered the Mughal Empire; calicoes were exported to America, Africa, Europe and Japan.
• Sarah Arderne, a married member of the lesser gentry in northern England in the late eighteenth century, spent a good deal of time and money on her husband’s linens... (Supplying his wants was her largest expense, representing 36 per cent of her annual expenditure; just 9 per cent went on the care of her five children.)
• Many of these metaphors, however, are themselves becoming over-stretched and threadbare, because most of us have very little experience or understanding of their original meanings... Take the phrase ‘tow-headed’: tow refers to pale gold flax fibres before they are spun, while being ‘on tenterhooks’ comes from the frame, or ‘tenter’, on which woollen cloth is stretched out after being washed.
• A plied yarn is one that is made from two or more threads, twisted together in the opposite direction to that in which they were spun. What this means practically, when it is done well with just the right amount of twist, is that the finished yarn is balanced and easier to work with: it will neither unravel nor twist up on itself.
• Body lice feed, unsurprisingly, on human bodies, but live exclusively in clothing. Finding out when these lice evolved from their forebears, head lice, would indicate when humans began habitually wearing clothing. Going by this method, evidence suggests we only donned clothes sometime between 42,000 and 72,000 years ago, or around the time that humans began migrating out of Africa
• Archaeologists – predominantly male – gave ancient ages names like ‘Iron’ and ‘Bronze’, rather than ‘Pottery’ or ‘Flax’. This implies that metal objects were the principal features of these times, when they are simply often the most visible and long-lasting remnants.
• conversely, if you are making particularly fine thread from short-stapled fibres, like cotton, then you would use a smaller, lighter whorl. An experienced spinner can use a simple spindle and whorl to superlative effect. Indian hand-spinners were said to be able to stretch a single pound of cotton into gossamer-thin thread over two hundred miles long: our modern machinery isn’t capable of such dexterity.
• It may have started with basketry using tender leaves and stems, through to matting, netting and cordage, each step getting the proto-weavers closer to creating flexible lengths of cloth.
• The Phoenicians grew rich trading Egyptian linen and, according to Herodotus – admittedly not always the most reliable witness – the bridge that the Persian king Xerxes built across the Hellespont in order to invade Greece was forged in part from ropes made from Egyptian flax. In fact, Egypt remained the leading producer of linen until the nineteenth century, when a French botanist discovered a variety of cotton well-suited to the muggy climate of the Nile delta,
• Tutankhamun was wrapped in sixteen distinct layers, as well as three coffins and a stone sarcophagus. Sources claim to have found pharaonic burial cloths a thousand yards long, so that they were wrapped around the body to a depth of forty thicknesses. Artemidona, who died in the late first or early second century and was buried at Meir, was encased in so much linen that the finished mummy was nearly two metres long
• By the mid-nineteenth century mummy unrollings had become fashionable spectacles in London and elsewhere in Europe; Thomas ‘Mummy’ Pettigrew became so famous for them that newspapers covered them as if they were theatrical productions. At one unrolling in 1909, recounted by the French novelist Pierre Loti, the audience became so geed up that the affair ended in slapstick. The royal mummy was ‘wrapped thousands of times in a marvellous winding sheet . . . finer than the muslin of India’, Loti recalled.
• Granville went on to give a talk about his findings at the Royal Institute. To add some dramatic flair, he lit the room with candles made from a pale, crumbly ‘resino-bituminous substance’ he had harvested in great quantities from around the mummified corpse and which he took to be beeswax. Granville was wrong about this too, however. As bodies decompose, fats and soft tissue break down into a greyish substance called adipocere or ‘gravewax’. Unbeknownst to him, Granville was probably enlightening his audience in a room lit by candles made from human flesh.
• A stew of wounded pride, grief and humiliation might seem poor nourishment for creativity, and yet somehow Su Hui managed to transfigure these emotions into the Star Gauge, a silken poem with a structure whose intricacy wasn’t equalled for five centuries.
  The work originally took the form of a grid, twenty-nine characters by twenty-nine characters, painstakingly embroidered in different colours onto a silk panel. It is both part and the apotheosis of a type of Chinese poetry called hui-wen shih, or ‘reversible poems’.
• Even though they are only a few inches long, each silkworm can create a continuous thread up to a thousand metres long and thirty microns wide, around half the width of a human hair. As they spin the silk, they coat it with sericin, a kind of gum – raw silk is sometimes known as silk-in-the-gum – that stiffens the cocoons. (It is this substance that was dissolved by the hot tea in Empress Xiling’s cup.)
• It has been estimated that producing a single kilogram of silk requires 220 kilograms of mulberry leaves. (Indeed, the need for mulberry leaves was so acute in antiquity that it was forbidden to fell mulberry trees in the spring when the silkworms naturally bred.) The leaves must be clean, dry and not too hot. Those picked during the heat of the day have to be left to cool in the shade, otherwise the caterpillars that eat them might die.
• ("Court Ladies Preparing Newly Woven Silk") To the uninitiated the scene is about as decorous as could be imagined but, as it happens, all three of the steps in silk processing shown are also tropes in erotic poetry. Pounding cloth, for example, was often used as a euphemism for a woman’s desire. The emperor, using a silken canvas, was implying that these glamorous, silk-clad women were working out their frustrated longing for him by making yet more silk.
• When Julius Caesar paid for silk awnings to be hung throughout Rome to provide shade for all the spectators at his military triumph, it was seen as a clear statement of not just his wealth but his intention to seize power. Emperor Nero is said to have hung star-spangled blue awnings over amphitheatres and commissioned a textile – likely also made from silk – that was dyed purple and decorated with an image of him standing in a chariot, the Roman equivalent of commissioning a portrait of yourself driving a sportscar.
• Contemporaries bemoaned the huge sums being spent on this foreign fabric. According to Pliny the Elder, each year emperors spent about 100 million sesterces (100,000 ounces of gold) buying silks from the East. This was a huge amount, roughly equivalent to 10 per cent of the annual budget.
• Gokstad ship:
• Numerous silken textiles have been found in Scandinavian graves that were woven as far afield as China and Persia. In fact, there is evidence that Arabic patterns and text – or even designs that appeared Islamic in origin – were popular status symbols. <> Using ships packed with preserved food, such as pickled herring, lamb smoked over reindeer droppings and fermented salmon, Norse people were able to travel vast distances.
• When Captain Cook visited the Pacific he speculated that many of the Polynesian islands he visited were colonised by the same wave of peoples, because of the similarities in their languages. More intriguingly still, the words for ‘mast’, ‘sail’ and ‘outrigger boom’ appear to be the oldest in the Austronesian spoken in the most isolated Philippine and Indonesian archipelagos, further suggesting that it was the technology of sailing boats that spread humanity over some of the remotest stretches of the globe.
• But what these North Atlantic sheep lack in heft, they more than make up for in hardiness and stubborn adaptability. They can, for the most part, fend for themselves, without the cosseting their modern kin require. They can also survive, even thrive, on a very rough diet. Those native to North Ronaldsay, the northernmost of the Orkney Islands, have adapted to eat seaweed almost exclusively, picking their way over the slippery rocks near the seashore and shunning lusher, greener fare... Their wool is crucially different too... their fleeces were made up of two layers, a wiry outer one covering a soft, highly insulating underwool. This isn’t common in the most widely farmed sheep today. Another oddity of the wool of the Old Norse sheep was its high lanolin content, which makes it more water-repellent: an excellent quality for making sails.
• it takes four or five people ten minutes or so to pull away all the loose hanks of wool from a single sheep. While more time-consuming than shearing, rooing has its advantages. Plucked wool is more water-resistant, and less carding – or combing – needs to be done to get rid of the short, new-growth woollen fibres that shearing includes.
• The long coarse fibres would be combed out and, using a drop spindle, spun tightly clockwise to create very strong yarns. These would be used for the warp, which needed to be waterproof and withstand the tensile stress and strain of the wind. The underwool was given gentler treatment and loosely spun anti-clockwise. This softer, looser thread would be used for the weft: when fulled – a process by which the fibres are rubbed so that they begin to clump together – the soft fibres would then create a denser and more windproof surface. Making these two kinds of thread required skill and a good deal of time. Someone with particular expertise can produce between thirty and fifty metres of yarn each hour using a spindle and distaff. Even so, a large sail of ninety metres square or so represents the labour of around two and a half modern working years.
• For a particularly large warship with a crew of perhaps seventy men, the figures are monstrous: one and a half tons of wool and up to sixty years’ labour. The production of such immense quantities of fabric represents a huge investment by a large community of people, the majority of them women.
• The Normans (whose name reflects their Norse Viking roots) had conquered England in 1066. Like their forebears, a principal goal was the wealth created by its rich woollen industry; unlike them, however, they were impressively organised. The Domesday Book – their countrywide survey of every settlement and how profitable it was – took twenty years to compile. The labour was worth it: the text provided a thorough picture of the economic landscape of their new possession and how much tax they could squeeze out of it.
• Lincoln was as famous for its reds as its greens. ‘Lincoln Scarlett’ was so sought after that the name was deployed similarly to the way a designer label is today; it was among the most expensive and desired fabrics in Venice in the mid-thirteenth century.
• Such remote locations were often ideal for rearing sheep. So integral did this activity become to the order, and so great their successes in the wool trade, that the Cistercians developed a rapacious appetite for land suitable for their flocks.
• I consider lace to be one of the prettiest imitations ever made of the fantasy of nature . . . I do not think that any invention of the human spirit could have a more graceful or precise origin.  -- Gabrielle Chanel
• Needlework, in fact, was one of the few occupations that women of all classes were encouraged to develop. Mary Queen of Scots and Catherine de’ Medici were both famous for their love of needlework. The estate of the latter included thousands of pieces of elaborately embroidered filet that she had made, including some complete bed furnishings.
• Laurens Reael was an important commission for van der Voort. He had recently returned to the Netherlands after a three-year stint as the governor-general of the Dutch East India Company, one of the most prestigious posts of the age; this portrait was a carefully crafted record of his triumph. Van der Voort was possibly chosen for his skill as a painter of luxurious fabrics.
• When in 1577 King Henry III of France sought to intimidate the Estates-General (a legislative, advisory assembly made up of groups of his subjects), he turned up to a meeting wearing 4,000 yards of gold lace.
• The desired effect was of lightness. The perforations allowed glimpses of the fabric or flesh beneath. Initially this was achieved through cutwork – a form of embroidery where a design on linen is reinforced with buttonhole stitch and then the enclosed areas are cut away – or drawn threadwork, where weft threads are removed from woven cloth and the remainder arranged into patterns and decorated with embroidery.
• There are, broadly speaking, two ways of making lace: with bobbins or with needles. The former has much more in common with passementerie – the kind of decorative trimming common on formal military uniforms – while the latter was descended directly from embroidery. Bobbin laces are traditionally built up over a pattern – during this period often made of parchment – which would be pinned to a pillow firm enough to keep the design taut as it was created.
• Needle laces, as the name suggests, are made using needles rather than bobbins. Lacemakers would also use parchment patterns to guide them in making needle laces, but the designs would be drawn out, rather than indicated by holes. Needle laces are made up of rows of detached buttonhole stitches, which are cast between an outline structure made from thicker threads. Punto in aria was an early Italian variant of needle lace; its name means, literally, ‘stitches in the air’.
• 1665... Colbert went further. He called on needle-workers from Italy and Flanders to emigrate to France, enticing them with promises of citizenship. He kept in close contact with the French ambassador in Venice. Most of their letters were in code, so sensitive had diplomatic relations become; those that aren’t, however, reveal that the French were deliberately siphoning off detailed information about the industry, quoting figures for levels of production and prices. This was, in other words, state-sanctioned industrial espionage, which the Italians weren’t prepared to take lying down. Venice promptly issued a counter-decree, commanding those tempted by Colbert’s offer not to take it up, and those who had already done so to return immediately, on pain of execution for treason.
• Italians never took to ruffs with quite the same gusto as the English, French and Spanish, who allowed them to grow as enormous as prize pumpkins.
• Since the Huguenots had traditionally played a vital part in the industry, it was a devastating blow when so many left the country, taking their skills with them. In Normandy alone, the number of lacemakers fell by half.28
  Other countries wrestled with different issues. The Italian lace industry, particularly in Venice, was bolstered by its reliance on wealthy patrons and the nimble, lacemaking fingers of nuns in Italian convents, whose prices were relatively low since they did not have houses to run or families to look after. Lacemakers in Flanders, however, had no such insulation from economic shocks. The same financial crash that felled the fortunes of Vermeer resulted in profound hardship for even the most skilled of Flemish lacemakers.
• Clothes were important words in the language of social interactions: queens of small European countries being eyed up by much larger and wealthier rivals needed an expansive vocabulary. Lace, like a rhetorician’s elocutio, provided persuasive final flourishes.
• although the wealthy were prepared to pay vast sums for lace, as we have seen, this money stubbornly refused to trickle down to those who made it. Part of the reason was that the lacemakers, who were overwhelmingly female, didn’t form corporations or guilds. This mattered because guilds functioned to give status to craftspeople who might lack it on an individual level. Without banding together, it was difficult to demonstrate the economic importance of their work or to demand higher wages and status in the same way passementiers and dyers were. (The strictness of guilds could also stymie or restrict economic opportunity, however. Passementiers, for example, saw humble linen thread as beneath them, because working with precious metal was a guild privilege, and therefore missed out on lacemaking work.)
• Doing so meant getting their own clothes or at least visually distinguishing themselves. Many, for example, were disinclined to wear white because it was so associated with slave clothing.
• Eli Whitney, a young Yale graduate, learned of the difficulties of ginning American Upland while staying on a friend’s plantation in Georgia in 1793. Within a year he had created a new kind of gin that efficiently combed out the seeds without breaking the delicate cotton fibres, secured a patent and set up a factory in Connecticut to manufacture them en masse. With one hand-operated gin, a single person could clean fifty pounds of American Upland cotton in a day.
• he would count the first hundred people he saw on the street and make a note of how many wore blue jeans. It was usually over half. More rigorous studies confirm his findings. In 2008, people globally wore jeans three and a half days each week.
• Levi jeans: At first they were offered in two fabrics: a heavy brown cotton similar to canvas, and denim, a tough, twilled fabric with a sturdy white warp over-woven with a weft coloured with indigo. (This is why denim is paler on the reverse, where the warp threads show.)
• The United States is the world’s third largest producer – behind India and China – producing 3.7 million metric tons in 2016–17. Forced labour persists under the fig leaf provided by the thirteenth amendment, which forbids slavery and involuntary servitude, ‘except as punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted’. With just over two million people currently incarcerated in America, this makes for a large, cheap and racially skewed labour force, a proportion of whom care for cotton crops, almost entirely unremunerated.
• Invented in 1879 by Thomas Burberry and inspired by Hampshire shepherds, who treated their smocks with lanolin to waterproof them, gabardine was at this time the most windproof and innovative cloth available. In essence, it was a tightly woven, light cotton fabric, each thread of which had a weatherproof coating, making it wind- and water-resistant, but also allowing for some breathability... The biggest difference between the two teams were their outer layers. The British relied exclusively on the gabardine cloth trousers and coats, while Amundsen’s topped these with reindeer or seal parkas and trousers. Amundsen had picked up this style of cold-weather clothing from the Netsilik Inuits
• Days before Mallory’s climb in 1924, Howard Somervell – his friend and fellow survivor of the 1922 expedition – reached 28,117 feet before the sore throat and hacking cough that had plagued him throughout the trip nearly ended his life. The mucous membrane lining of his throat had frozen and broken away, become stuck in his windpipe and was choking him to death. He gave himself the Heimlich manoeuvre, coughed up ‘the obstructing matter along with a lot of blood’ and survived.
• The sleeping bags of the Scott expedition, made of reindeer skin and eiderdown, became so sodden that they would freeze as hard as iron bars: attempts to roll them up would split the seams. The more sodden they were, the harder it was to dry them out and the colder their occupants became. This inevitably meant wearing even more clothes, which in turn would dampen with sweat and turn icy.
• Tragically, one solution had been discovered before both Mallory and Scott’s expeditions but, perhaps because it looked decidedly unheroic, it had been rejected. Although the down of ducks and geese had long been used in quilted petticoats and bedding, no one had ever considered using them for cold-weather clothing until George Finch had a suit made up to his own design consisting of an ‘eiderdown lined coat, trousers and gauntlets’ covered in balloon fabric.
• During the long march back from the South Pole the men were slowed by the deplorable condition of Oates’ feet and, tired, defeated and rapidly wearing through their socks and finnesko (soft fur boots), all began to develop symptoms, slowing them down still further. Scott succumbed too just ten days before his death: ‘My right foot has gone, nearly all the toes – two days ago I was proud possessor of best feet.’
• Women on both sides of the Atlantic suddenly denied stockings were forced to get creative. Cosmetic companies brought out make-up that could replicate the look of stockings: Helena Rubenstein’s was called Leg Stick;
• The term ‘carbon disulphide’ doesn’t appear once in Résistance: she vaguely refers to nearly all the chemicals that they worked with as ‘acid’. They learn on the job from each other, with very little supervision: each new horror comes as a surprise. Something they discover early is to try to avoid the molten viscose – they were working with open vats, without the safety hoods and equipment normally used to protect workers. It ‘produces terrible burns, like phosphorus’, Agnès writes soon after she has begun working with viscose, ‘it sticks to the wounds it causes and is impossible to remove, eating the flesh away to the bone.’
• We are making far more than we could ever reasonably need. In 2010, for example, it was estimated that 150 billion garments were stitched together, enough to provide each person alive with twenty new articles of clothing... Canopy, an environmental organisation, believes that 120 million trees are felled each year to produce rayon and other cellulose-based materials. <> In Indonesia, bamboo is often planted over the site of felled trees to produce fabrics that can then be marketed as being ‘renewable’ and environmentally friendly. Because rayon is made from cellulose, it is ripe for greenwashing
• In 1942 the water of the Roanoke River in Virginia near a rayon plant was tested for cleanliness. Researchers drew off tanks of water from the river that had been contaminated with American Viscose effluent and put fish in the tanks to see what would happen. No fish survived longer than ten minutes. They reached the conclusion that the river was now so polluted that not only was it unfit as a habitat for wildlife and for human recreation, but it was also ‘injurious to hydraulic machinery’.
• The lack of gravity alters vision and causes nausea and even physical sickness. This may not sound too serious, but in the very small confines of a helmet, globules of floating vomit become much more problematic. (A Subcommittee on Motion Sickness was convened as early as 1944.)
• The pair donned helmets, gloves and the oxygen-and-cool-water-bearing PLSS in the tiny, eight-foot Lunar Module (LM) cabin right before their moonwalk. The gloves had printed to-do lists Velcroed to them: there was so much to do they were afraid they would forget.
• Each suit was fashioned by hand on a sewing floor populated entirely by women – seamstresses, pattern-cutters and makers – using adapted Singer sewing machines, standard pattern templates and the skills both inherent and honed from years of making women’s underwear. Those who had been trained to mould liquid latex to create girdles and bras found themselves making pressure bladders instead. Eleanor Foraker, an experienced seamstress, was pulled from Playtex’s diaper assembly line in 1964 to work on the Apollo project. The Omega spacesuits inherited other things from the firm’s main line of work too. The nylon tricot (a kind of knit mesh) embedded in the rubber to prevent it from ballooning was the same sheer fabric used to make many Playtex bras.
• In 1967, after a rogue pin was found between the layers of a suit prototype, an X-ray machine was installed on the sewing-room floor to scan each layer of fabric produced... To meet NASA’s exacting standards, seams could deviate no more than one-sixty-fourth of an inch. Handling the latex and gluing the layers together also required previously unheard-of levels of skill. Only three or four of Playtex’s employees, for example, were considered sufficiently deft to fashion the paper-thin layers of latex to make the suit’s internal bladder. <> What made all this so much harder was the number of layers and components involved, each of which had to line up precisely with all its fellows. In the end, each Omega suit worn on the moon was comprised of some four thousand pieces of fabric and twenty-one distinct layers of material.27 A cross-section would reveal a symphony of synthetics: Teflon-coated Beta cloth, a kind of fireproof silica cloth similar to fabric fibreglass; Mylar and Dacron, both types of tough but lightweight polyester for insulation; Nomex, a heat-resistant fibre still used by firefighters, and Kapton, a polyimide that is highly resistant to temperature extremes; and Chromel-R, a kind of woven stainless steel.
• For the team at ILC, the efforts made to transfigure their processes into NASA-style technological documents were bamboozling... In the end, to satisfy NASA’s preference for technical drawings and shipping documents over patterns and craftsmanship, a workaround was created. ILC employed a team of trained engineers, whose job was to be both a buffer and translator between ILC’s craftswomen and NASA’s technocrats. The result was that from then on each suit came with its own stack of onionskin paper a foot high covered with technical drawings and engineering jargon lovingly describing every layer and stitch, which was entirely separate from – and never used by – the women actually making them.
• Astronauts have used underpants as plant pots, for example, but most end up being sent back into the earth’s orbit in a vessel at a trajectory that will cause it to burn up upon re-entry like shooting stars.
• Although ‘maximum-absorbency garments’ – or diapers, to anyone not working at NASA – could be worn on shorter missions, on longer ones they are obviously impractical. Instead, a kind of bag with an adhesive rim is used (the adhesive secured to the skin first); the faeces then has to be swatted towards the bottom of the bag, since it would otherwise float away, before the bag can be detached and stored.
• Traditionally, overlapping fabric is sewn together to create a seam, but this results in slightly bulging lines, which act like tiny brakes infinitesimally slowing the wearer down. The alternative Speedo hit upon was to weld the edges of the pieces of fabric together using the heat generated by ultrasonic waves. This reduced the profile of the seam, which in turn resulted in 8 per cent less drag. The suits were to be worn as tight as a corset – getting into the shoulder-to-ankle design required a zip, also low-profile and ultrasonically welded – and featured panels of polyurethane placed at specific points across the body, further helping to streamline it.
• there is still robust debate about the precise ratio of wool to synthetic fibre that the felt covering tennis balls should contain, since each company adheres to a different standard, and the fuzziness of a ball helps determine its speed.
• this was not the first time they had tangled with this incredible fabric. Simon Peers, a British textile expert, and Nicholas Godley, an American designer, both based in Madagascar, had, some four years previously, completed a rich tapestry using the stuff. It was 335 by 122 centimetres, spun from the silk of around 1.2 million spiders
• Spiders are remarkable. Over the course of a single night and using only a self-generated material, many species can build a vast multi-purpose structure. To put it in human terms, it’s like making a web the size of a football pitch and then using it to catch prey equivalent in mass to an aeroplane. Dating back nearly 380 million years, they have evolved into over forty thousand separate species.
• It was estimated, for example, that it would take twelve spiders to produce enough silk to equal the output of a single cocoon of the Bombyx mori silkworm, and 27,648 to produce a single pound of silk. It was also discovered that spiders were deeply resistant to being farmed. For one thing, it was well nigh impossible to catch enough flies to feed such vast numbers of them. Worse still was their tendency to attack and kill one another when confined together.
• Mr Nogué, his colleague, built a contraption that, while it looked sinister, allowed N. Madagascariensis spiders to be silked in groups without being harmed. Silk collected in this fashion in Antananarivo was made into bed hangings that were displayed, with much fanfare, at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, before disappearing without a trace. <> For Simon Peers, who lived and worked in Madagascar producing textiles, rumours of the island’s spider-silk-weaving past were like a fairy tale, often heard but never fully believed.
• A simpler solution, and one that is being explored by several different firms, involves altering the genes of silkworms. Domesticated silkworms, Bombyx mori, are already incredibly efficient silk producers: around 40 per cent of their bodyweight is devoted to silk glands and the skills needed to handle them are already widespread.
• Although we can’t be sure, this sounds a lot like sea silk, a fabric that, according to the Book of Exodus, was worn by King Solomon. Exceptionally rare and airy, the raw material for sea silk or byssus is threads of solidified saliva of Pinna nobilis, a large mollusc native to the Mediterranean waters surrounding Sardinia. These strands, which P. nobilis uses to attach itself firmly to rocks, are difficult and time-consuming to harvest and weave, but for those who know how, the end result is remarkable for the way the soft brown threads glint golden when exposed to the sun. Today, only one woman is able to harvest and make sea silk. Chiara Vigo