Styrofoam Cup Spiders

Aren’t these little guys adorable?  Leah LOVES crafts and it’s sometimes hard to come up with ideas for her, but these styrofoam cup spiders were fabulous.  There was painting involved, pipe cleaners, googly eyes, all things that my preschooler is getting pretty good with (with a little help of course), so we were pretty happy with this activity.

As usual, I just used some black acrylic paint from the dollar store (and some red and yellow too).  It’s taking awhile, but we are building a little collection of colours to choose from.

First you’ll need to paint the styrofoam cup.  It took 3 coats of paint to get a decent black colour.  But that was only because I was 1) being picky and 2) letting Leah paint because it was keeping her occupied.

Our other trusty dollar store materials were some assorted googly eyes, some white craft glue, some pipe cleaners, and of course some styrofoam cups.

After you paint your cup, you have to make the legs.  Start by cutting the pipe cleaners in half.  I was doing two at a time here:

Fold up the end about 1/2″ to make a sort of ‘L’ shape:

Fold the pipe cleaner in half to make the spider leg’s knee:

And voila, you have a spider leg.  Now repeat this 7 more times with different colours of pipe cleaners.

Poke the pipe cleaner through the rim of the cup at an angle.  If it’s wobbly you can bend the pipe cleaner on the inside of the cup to make it stay in position better:

After you poke through all 8 spider legs, the inside of the cup will look something like this:

For the mouth, fold the pipe cleaner into a smile, then fold back the two sides so you can poke it through the cup:

Leah was really proud of hers.  It ended up looking like this:

We had to help a little more with 18 month old Kate’s spider.  It ended up looking like this in the end.  Her favourite part was picking off the googly eyes when we were done:

By the end of it, we had a small army of spiders.  My favourites were the ones with the wonky eyes.  It definitely gave them some extra fun character.

The coolest part, was that when you set them on the ground, the styrofoam cup kind of floated above the legs.  See the red one off to the back?  He totally looks like he’s walking: 

Both of my girls loved making these and playing with them.  It was a two day process before we finally had them painted, dried and ready to go, but that just meant I didn’t have to come up with any different ideas for craft time for a whole weekend.

I never know what to do with pipe cleaners?  So I was also happy that we got to go through lots of them here.  I’ll have to do a pipe cleaner crafts round up some day.

Leah has been afraid of spider webs and bugs lately, so hopefully this helps her get over it a little bit… maybe?  Can you trick a 3 year old into thinking spider webs and bugs are okay?

Source : onelittleproject.com
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