Halfland Web 2.0

Halfland spiders are extremely serious about their webs.

 I have fretted over building these spider webs forever. I knew I wanted them to be durable and lasting, be the right scale, look natural/organic, look carefully woven, have crystal drops on them to suggest dew drops as jewels. And somehow, I wanted them to have lace patterns included--not lace as a web--but as though part of the web suggested lace as we know it. Whew. I did it. I love it. And wish I could do a bunch more but will limit it to just two. The big one on the porch, shot from 2 angles, seen above.

In the film, the main character Rana walks through the web and it remains on her as a necklace.
I was able to make this happen by using a special elastic for the web that the puppet can actually walk into frame by frame. The next shot after that will have a non-elastic replica of the web worn on the puppet's body.

I used a combination of the stretchy and plain white sewing threads to weave the pattern. I included crystal beads into it as well as stiffened details of handmade lace that friend Mandy gave me.
 
I had gathered many reels of various styles of elastic cording for this task, all of which will now be put to use in the armature making depart instead after I found... GOSSAMER FLOSS! Of course purely by accident. I stopped into a random bead shop just the other day and they carried this product (I have a life theory that one must shop at every bead store one sees to be complete as each shop carries different items. Words to live by) I had never heard of this stuff and even though it cost twice what the others do (I paid $7 for 20 yards), I knew the minute I saw it that it was THE stuff to make these webs.

The first web I tried with it, straight off the card, was too thick even when stretched (seen on left in photos above this one). So I fricking snipped it and frayed its fibers down to microns and used it which worked perfectly. It's translucent, latex free. I suspect it must be essentially Lycra fibers.

I attached the spokes to little hardware eye screws anchored in the set wood and then wove more snipped down elastic and plain thread into a sort of drunken crossways pattern. Where the fibers were too thin, I bulked them back up with a layer of elastic jelly called Aleene's Stop Fraying, which remains 100% flexible when dry.

Everyone's so creative.