We had a large spider visiting our lemon tree on the balcony this autumn. We admired its beautiful colors, not daring to come too close to it. I did, however, take a photo of it and examined it in a more relaxed environment (i.e. not peeping into its large web) This was half a year ago and our toddler doesn’t remember it at all. After we were reading something about spiders, I showed the photo to him and he seemed impressed. Asking if he could have one, I got crafty and came up with a simple idea. 

It took us altogether 10 minutes – and more than half of them were spent hijacking the craft boxes for materials.

Supplies:

– some black craft foam
– black pipe cleaners
– glue
– scissors
– googly eyes

How To Make A Spider

1) Use a piece of black craft foam to cut out a shape that resembles number 8. Cut two pipe cleaners in half, so you’ll get 4 “sticks”. Fold each of the sticks in half, meaning you’ll get 8 spider legs.

2) Apply 4 dots of liquid glue onto the spider’s ‘body’ as you see on the below photo.

(You’ll notice below that I used a wrong glue at first, noticing it immediately because it didn’t stick. UHU – the Alleskleber didn’t make it this time… So I had to clean the old glue off and placed Super Glue onto the surface. To avoid my mistake, it’s best to check in advance whether the glue you are about to apply is appropriate for craft foam or not.)

3) Your kid can help here, placing the spider’s legs onto the glue dots.

4) To secure the spider legs, you might want to add an additional circle of craft foam – our kid named this piece ‘the spider’s belly’.

5)  So, the ‘belly is attached.

6) Now flip the spider to add an (optional) circle onto the upper part of the body (just an embellishment actually).. And help the child attach the googly eyes.

7) Now it’s time to bend the spider’s legs: we bent each of the legs twice: once in the middle, and once just at the bottom, to mark the ‘foot’. This is how the spider became more of a live ‘crawling’  and ‘jumping’ creature. DONE!

If you place a finger onto the spider (pressing it onto the floor) and release it quickly, your spider will JUMP up! Our child really enjoyed this game, on and on.

At the end of the day, the spider found a new home – our kid’s miniature basketball rim. I thought it was spooky, but our kid doesn’t share my opinion. He loves his new spider 🙂