THIS EDITION - The first product from our workshop available online, at the insistence of Megan Herbert, was a bound skarf, black wool with off-white binding. It was released as a means of survival during the total global crash of 2008, as yet uncoded, but later became SR110 – Bound Skarf. In that time, it has come long, short, looped, and burned, it has come printed, woven from metal, and chemically stripped to an inch of the tension that holds its thread count together. ĀTOR continues the unplanned evolution of the original SR110 - Bound Skarf, itself a scaled version of the skarves made only as gifts previously. It is a subtly constructed object, with no obvious start and finish, almost atmospherically held together. The warm handle of silk, the spectral presence of the tape, and shimmer of the silk tug at your attention – it is said of the spider’s torn web, there is no beginning and no end in the infinite melancholy of lost potential. 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 took 7 years to smuggle the skeins from the darkest corners of the lab it was grown in, a place where no light touches. Hastily wrapped in plastic and taped to protect it from the sea, it arrived in Iceland as 3 loose skeins ready to be unwoven by hand and spooled by length. 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... And then another 3 days convincing by spoken word it to become an emperor’s new clothing. Weight for weight, silk is stronger than steel and tougher than Kevlar. But for none does the spider weave than its prey. Spider silk first appeared as a set in a different incarnation. Its ancestors, SR438 - The Emperor’s New Entangling and SR447 - Coppe Web, made in the Reykjavík studio, featured as a part of the Autumn and Winter 2012 collection: FIELD DRESSING Where The Darkness Divides This next generation is woven, its proteins color treated with hot acid, then cured. After cutting it is twisted into a Möbius 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. ĀTOR 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. It is the 8-hands technique, as the legs of a spider. Arachnid style. Read less