spider cloth

• spider-cloth

spider cloth (countable and uncountable, plural spider cloths)

1. (archaic) A sheer fabric made of cotton and silk.
   • 1907, Dry Goods Guide, New York: Black Publishing Company, p. 19,

     Several new fabrics of cotton and silk are marvels of beauty in design and color. Spider cloth, which comes under this list, is very sheer and has a silk sheen. It is printed in floral patterns or in narrow stripes alternating with floral designs in spray or detached blossoms, the colors in all the delicate tones of pink, green and gray or in blue and white.

   • 1921, D. H. Lawrence, Sea and Sardinia, New York: T. Seltzer, Chapter 8, p. 312,

     It was a gray morning on deck, a gray sea, a gray sky, and a gray, spider-cloth, unimportant coast of Italy not far away.

2. A cloth (real, hypothetical or imaginary) manufactured using spider silk.
   • 1885, The Popular Science Monthly, March 1885, “Popular Miscellany,” p. 718,

     A few species of spiders encourage the hope that the manufacture of spider cloth may yet become something more than a dream.

   • 1893, Henry Christopher McCook, American Spiders and Their Spinning Work, Philadelphia: the author, Academy of Natural Science, Volume 3, Chapter 4, p. 84,

     the Emperor Aurengzebe of Hindostan, who reproved his daughter for the indelicacy of her costume, although she wore as many as seven thicknesses of spider cloth!

   • 1919, Dorothy Scarborough, chapter 2, in From a Southern Porch‎, New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, page 38:

     A man in Munich raises a certain breed of spiders that spin threads of astonishing strength, which he weaves into cloth as delicate as dream, yet substantial enough to allow pictures to be painted upon it. This spider-cloth I saw had on it the portrait of a laughing mountaineer in gala attire […]

   • 1939, Edgar Rice Burroughs, chapter 9, in Carson of Venus‎, London: New English Library, published 1978, page 140:

     New sails were made of the strong, light “spider cloth” that is common among the civilized countries of Amtor, where spiders are bred and kept for the purpose of spinning their webs for commercial use […]