Yarn wrapped spider craft for Halloween

This ever so cute, not really scary yarn wrapped spider is easy to make and offers a great fine motor skills work out for little fingers.

 

Yarn wrapped spider craft for kids

I’ve been working with the Tots100 as one of their Bostik Bloggers, which means every so often they send me a box of lovely craft materials with the invitation to dig in and make something. Fun, hey? This month’s box, with goodies from Craft Merrily, included some lovely stripy pipe cleaners, which my daughter loved. So, we combined them with some yarn in Halloween colours, and a polystyrene ball, to make this fun spider craft.

 

 

We used some Bostik Sticki Dots for our spider – totally mess free. A top tip for using them: stick them down and then peel off the plastic film, then the dots will be exactly where you need them, not all over your fingers. We stuck ours in spots all over the polystyrene ball to give us a sticky surface for our yarn to fix on to. (Fine motor fact: peeling things like stickers and this plastic film is great for dexterity.)

 

 

Then we wrapped our yarn all-ways over the ball. We used a mix of colours, but you might like to make an all-black spider too. The criss-cross yarn is a nice texture for children to explore, and using the yarn, and turning the ball around and around, are more good practice for nimble hands and fingers.

 

 

We made some homemade googly eyes, using white craft foam and a black marker pen. Confession: I can not cut out a circle! No matter how I try, a free-style circle always turns out wonky. Fortunately my daughter is a circle-whizz.

 

 

The glue dots are great for sticking the eyes on to the yarn. Did you know spiders have more than two eyes? We had a quick science lesson as we Googled this!

 

 

Finally we cut each pipe cleaner in half, giving us eight stripy legs. The pipe cleaners will poke straight in to the polystyrene body, and you can bend them to give them a creepy-crawly shape.

 

 

And here’s our finished spider. It will perch nicely on the backs of chairs, or peeking out of bookcases – or we might add a length of elastic so it can dangle down from the doorway.