Pom-Pom Spiders

As I was dropping my daughter off at preschool this morning, she noticed that her teacher had decorated the bushes in her front yard with fake webs and cute little pipe-cleaner spiders (made by wrapping pieces of pipe cleaner around your finger and adding googly eyes). Loved it! I'm all about cutesy Halloween decorations...I'm not a lover of the scary, bloody version of Halloween.
When I went to pick her up from preschool, we decide that we'd head to Hobby Lobby and pick up some supplies to make our own spiders. I decided to kick it up a notch and make them similar to ones I've made in the past, using googly eyes, pom-poms, and pipe cleaner. My daughter, being the diva she is, wanted to make them sparkly, so we got the sparkly pom-poms and pipe cleaner. Here's what we did:

Here are the supplies I used: Sparkly pipe cleaner, sparkly pom-poms, googly eyes, kite string (or any kind of string), scissors, and hot glue. If you want this to be an activity the kids can do, you can use craft glue, though it won't dry as fast. I'm all about drying fast, so I had Diana help with the bending and cutting and I did all the gluing. 

Take a piece of pipe cleaner.. (forgive my paint-stained table. Our table needs to be refinished, so I just do all my crafts straight on the table, and put a tablecloth on when people come over).

Fold it in thirds..

And cut it at the folds..

To make this! Then take each of those pieces and cut them in half once again. Each whole stick of pipe cleaner (before it's been cut) will make enough legs in the end for 1 1/2 spiders.

Now, take each piece of pipe cleaner and fold it in half over your finger to make a pair of legs. Make 4 of these for each spider (to make 8 legs, naturally!).

Decide where you want to be the belly of the spider to be, apply some glue, and press in the legs.

..Like this!

Once you add on all 4 pairs of legs, it will look like this.

Now, add a strip of glue to the 'front' of your spider and add the googly eyes. (We made one for each member of our family, so I bought both regular black and eyelashed colored eyes.)

Now, we're going to add some web to our spider so it can be hung up. Decide how long you want your finished spider to hang, and cut a piece of string accordingly. (I made each spider a different length)

Next, apply a strip of glue going all the way up the back of your spider, from where it's last pair of legs start, all the way up to the middle of the top of the head, and press in one end of your string.

Here's a frontal view of the finished spider. After it was finished, I bent the legs to make them more round and spider-like.

And here's the whole family! I added a bow to my daughters, made out of the same string as the web. She loved it! I also ended up re-doing the Daddy one because this one ended up with glue all over his face.

..And now your spider family is ready for display!

Don't you just love it?!

So easy, so fun, and so cute!