Sea silk is an extremely fine, rare, and valuable fabric that is made from the long silky filaments or byssus secreted by a gland in the foot of pen shells (in particular Pinna nobilis). [1] The byssus is used by the mussel to attach itself to the sea bed.

Sep 8, 2015 · When it comes to producing fibers for human clothing, silkworms are nature’s hardest-working larvae. But they’ve got competition — in fact, reports the BBC’s Max Paradiso, the world’s...

Sep 13, 2017 · Sea silk sounds like the stuff of legend. Harvested from rare clams, this thread flashes gold in the sunlight, weighs almost nothing, and comes with a heavy load of misunderstanding,...

Sep 2, 2015 · Silk is usually made from the cocoons spun by silkworms - but there is another, much rarer, cloth known as sea silk or byssus, which comes from a clam. Chiara Vigo is thought to be the only...

Sep 6, 2017 · After an invitation to visit Vigo’s one-room studio, I suddenly found myself face-to-face with the last surviving sea silk seamstress, watching her magically spin solidified clam spit into gold.

Apr 9, 2023 · Discover the truth behind the rare and valuable sea silk, harvested from Mediterranean clams, spun by only one person.

Oct 3, 2017 · Sea silk is a highly-precious fabric that is so rare only one woman left on earth knows the secret to its creation. Whilst silk is famously known to be obtained from the cocoons of the mulberry silkworm larvae, sea silk comes from a …

Apr 17, 2023 · Byssus is a beard-like growth, a snaggle of filaments as long as six inches. They form when the clam spits protein-rich saliva into the water, and they attach the clam to a rock or to the floor of the sea. Byssus can be woven into the world’s finest, lightest, silkiest, rarest fabric.

Pinna nobilis, known by the common names noble pen shell and fan mussel, is a large species of Mediterranean clam, a marine bivalve mollusc in the family Pinnidae, the pen shells. [2] It reaches up to 120 cm (4 ft) of shell length. [3] It produces a rare manganese-containing porphyrin protein known as pinnaglobin. [4]

This site focuses on the process of harvesting pen clams and creating textiles from their byssal threads. It is intended to be a guide for anyone interested in the tools and methods used to create textiles similar to those historically produced in Italy, called byssus or sea silk.