With Halloween coming up and all the scary little things we can make, Teddy has found his crafting mo-jo. He watched as our neighbors decorated their lawn with all sorts of haunted goodies and, at first, he pleaded for us to ‘go to the store and buy decorations’. ‘No,’ I replied… ‘Let’s make our own.’ He was rather skeptical at first… how could our home-made creations rival those shiny ones from the store?
But, look… they can!
This is what we needed to make our pine cone spider…
- a pine cone (foraged from the neighborhood)
- 4 brown pipe cleaners
- squiggly eyes
- glue
Teddy arranged the pipe cleaners around the pine cone to make perfect spider legs. It was very interesting to Teddy’s 5 year-old mind that 4 pipe cleaners would produce 8 legs… at first he was worried his spider would only have 4.
He bent the pipe cleaners up and down… and suddenly his pine cone started to look like a creepy spider. He learned the word arachnid… it sure does sound like a funny word when you say it over and over again.
He stuck on two squiggly eyes and his spider was complete. Eeeeek!!! We tied a piece of yarn onto one of the pine cone tines and our spooky pine cone spider is now hanging from the tree on the lawn. I love to see Teddy’s realization that our handmade decorations can rival (and even surpass) the ones we could have bought at the store.
Have you made anything fun for Halloween yet?
Blessings and magic,
Donni
7 Responses
i love your posts. so many neat ideas for (cheap!) crafting. keep ’em coming!
We haven’t started our Hallowe’en crafting yet (we’re still caught up in leaves, and Fall, and pumpkins!), but I love love love these spiders … I do so appreciate a craft project that Little Ones can do on their own, without a grown up ‘helping’ ie, doing most of the work!
thanks for the lovely, very simple idea. it made going for a walk very exciting (looking for the right pine cone) and you are right, this is much prettier than stuff we buy at the store.
So cute. Looking for something for kindergarten boys
Good info. Lucky me I discovered your blog by chance (stumbleupon).
I have book marked it for later!
Want to use in the classroom. How do I get rid of the sticky sap on the Pine cones?
Hi Rita,
The pine cones I used didn’t have stick sap. I don’t know a nice way of getting rid of the sap… my best advice would be to find pine cones that don’t have sap.
xo Donni