Spider silk textile project

A friend sent me an interesting article on a project involving a million spiders, and the resulting textile woven from their silk. Read that here: http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/09/spider-silk/

An email from the ether..?

This afternoon I received an email from a Dr. Anna Kyritsi about a 7-day "EU Grundtvig Workshop in Cyprus" on needlework and traditional 'female' art. It mentioned the possibility of a grant that would cover even the cost of travel. Naturally, I'm intrigued, and yet I have no idea how this email came to be in my inbox. It doesn't appear to have been forwarded by anyone whom I know, nor do I ever recall signing up for any such email notification. And it made it past my spam filter.

Do any of you fellow textile people know anything about this? The website is this: www.biolearning.eu

13th century brick stitch pattern, revised version

As promised, here's the pattern I've come up with to account for the tantalizing gaps in KIK/IRPA object no. 43380. 49% squinting at the computer screen, 51% guesswork:

Warning: the image is pretty big. Probably bigger than it needed to be.


The grey areas are where the ground fabric seems to be consistently exposed. Much like the last pattern I posted, this could be due to caustic dyestuff eating away the threads, intentional picking out of thread (maybe it was gold!), left like that intentionally for a textured effect, or perhaps some other reason that I just can't think of yet. I have no data yet as to which reason is more likely.