Mr Peers and Mr Godley, who worked on the project for five years, say they have created a work of art

Mr Peers was inspired by 19th-century accounts of a unique attempt by a French colonial administrator to spin cloth from the silken threads of Madagascar's ubiquitous golden orb spider.

'I wasn’t sure if the stories were apocryphal or real,' Mr Peers told the Sunday Times.

Initial attempts to recreate an elaborate mechanical contraption that could harness up to 24 spiders at a time were thwarted when the female spiders started eating each other.

Mr Peers told the newspaper: 'We would start with 20 and end up with three very fat ones.'

The spider-silk shawl is hand-woven with traditional Malagasy motifs and is larger than any other pieces of spider cloth.

Mr Peers knows of only two other pieces, both of which are only a few centimetres wide and are kept in a museum in Lyons, France.

'I think we’ve surpassed anyone else,' he told the Sunday Times.

While some spiders naturally died during production, Mr Peers and Mr Godley set up a system so that spiders being used were released daily.

'We have become sort of the defenders of these spiders, something we never thought we’d be,' Mr Godley told the New York Times.

'They really are very regal-looking creatures.'