Hello and Happy October Craft Thyme readers!
My name is Laura, and I blog at The Experimental Home, where I share my everyday creative experiments. I “met” Brianna back in August, when she was my package pal. We hit it off, and decided to pull the ol’ switcharoo on you today, I hope you don’t mind.
Now that it is actually October, I am getting excited for Halloween. It is such a fun holiday, and it is so much fun to
make silly and spooky decorations. Yeah, for me, silly and spooky go together. I am the kind of girl that laughs at horror
films (to the point that my husband won’t go to a scary movie with me). Speaking of silly and spooky, check out this spider I am going to show you how to make today… can you believe I made it out of a pair of gloves?
I picked up a pair of basic black stretchy gloves in the dollar section of my local Michaels. Clearly I didn’t go to the
craft store to find gloves, but I can’t resist browsing the deals in the dollar section. I looked at the 8 fingers and immediately thought spider… I know, I am weird like that. I took them home and experimented until I came up with the perfect pair of gloves spider.
The first thing to do to transform these gloves into a spider is to give them a little structure. I used pipe cleaners so
the spider’s legs would be bendable and shapeable. I folded a pipe cleaner in half and bent down the tips to keep them from poking through the fingertips of the gloves.
I stuck the two ends of the pipe cleaner in two adjacent fingers. Since there are eight fingers, I needed a total of four
pipecleaners, plus one for the thumbs. For the thumbs, I just bent down the tips and stuck it in one thumb for the time being.
Time to stuff. Get out a bag of fiberfill and stuff those gloves. I found it was easier to stuff each finger individually
before stuffing the palm. Stuff all the fingers first, then the palm and thumb of the glove with the pipe cleaner hanging
out – get it good and stuffed. Don’t stuff the palm or thumb of the other glove yet.
Finally, stick the loose pipe cleaner end in the other thumb, and fill the thumb with stuffing. Now you are all set to transform your gloves into a spider. Put the stuffed glove inside the empty one folding the cuff of the empty one under as you go.
Look, you have a spider!
Spend a little time (or way to long if you want) bending and sculpting the legs to make your little spider look just right.
Then seal up the “seam”. I just squirted in a little fabric glue, but you could also use white or hot glue, or simply stitch
him shut. For a little extra fun, I glued on eight googly eyes. I actually took a minute to search spider eyes on google images to learn about spider-eye arrangements… yikes, that’s a creepy bunch of images. Happy Halloween!
Good thing my pair of gloves spider is just as silly as he is spooky.
Here is a fun spider factoid, the pincher things in front of spider’s mouth (made by the thumbs of my gloves) are called chelicerae. The final segment of the chelicerae are the spider’s fangs. Google image that if you dare.
So, if you have a few minutes and a pair of gloves, make your self a little spider and show off your new spider knowledge.
Better yet, help a kid in your life make a pair of gloves spider and learn all about spiders together.
A big thank you to Brianna for swapping blogs with me today. I can’t wait to see all the fun Halloween projects she has
in store for us!
Don’t forget to stop by The Experimental Home to say hi and check out all my everyday experiments.
Enjoy these articles? Get biweekly updates by joining my mailing list (no spam, no way, no how)
