Layers of Meaning

Steel Thread

"Bridgestone Metalpha Corporation (a subsidiary of Bridgestone Tire Company) has come up with a revolutionary fiber that which is a by-product of manufacturing steel reinforcements for tires. This fiber has the softness of silk but is made of 100 per cent stainless steel. Iron-clad stainless steel filaments are stretched over many stages after which the iron is removed by acid. One of the most innovative features about this material, known as Alphatex™, is its ability to take on color by using a combination of chemical and heat processes instead of dye." (Museum of Modern Art: Contemporary Japanese Textiles).

A video of the making of Alphatex thread from steel.

Note: the word 'new' is relative; article is from 1998. The yarn still has not received mass adoption though. The thread/yarn appears to be intended for weaving, rather than sewing. Imagine what it might do to the tension disks on a household sewing machine.
A first hand description of Alphatex: "I met Junichi Arai, a master of textile design, who has been experimenting with the potential of the fiber. He was wearing a long scarf of varied earth colors.He took it off so I could feel its textures and heft its weight. I nearly dropped it! He told me it weighed about two kilos."

Another hands-on description of the steel yarn by weaver Peter Collingwood: "It is not often that a completely new yarn appears. But this is what has happened in Japan. A large company which draws wire, mainly to be used as reinforcement in radial car tyres, has a department which develops new products. This has, in the last year, produced a yarn from exceedingly fine micro-filaments of stainless steel. Their first yarn, about the size of a 2/ply carpet wool, has 6,800 such filaments!
It is as flexible as, and in fact looks like, silk. But the moment you touch it you feel its weight. It has about 350 yards to the pound, which at the moment costs around $110! It has a natural light grey colour but I was shown some wonderful dark browns and blues which had been obtained by some chemical treatment. This colouring, which is assumed to be completely permanent, is only in an experimental stage and more colours will be developed."

Fiberarts Magazine printed excerpts of Colingswood's journals on the weaving with steel yarn:
"The steel yarn's overriding obedience is to gravity. If it can possibly slip, slither, or slide down where an ordinary yarn would not, it certainly will. If there is some projection it will snake out to catch it. Luckily its strength means this just stops the mill with a jerk; nothing can break. When on the mill, it began to slip down the vertical uprights until I stuck strips of Velcro onto them. Despite this slipperiness it holds well once it is knotted; against this any slight tangle is immovable until each thread is pulled out separately."

Humorously, Collingswood describes the problem of cutting steel with steel: "Develop a better way of threading than above, so it goes more speedily. As usual scissors get blunt quickly and I have to sharpen them often on a rather feeble electric gadget. This makes them cut the steel yarn but strangely not the linen warp ends which I use for tying up the cross in each small warp."