Creepy Crawlies

Furry Craft Stems  

age: 5yrs plus  

Spiders and creepy crawlies are the first thing that children often want to make using furry craft stems (chenille pipe cleaners). This involves making a 3 dimensional shape – which can easily end up in a tangled mess, using up lots of stems. Here is a rather wonky spider!

If you cut out a body from thin card and punch holes around the edge, you can then easily push the legs and feelers all the way through, bending them into shape at the end.

Using card with craft stems in this way seems to add something extra to the design possibilities, resulting in a much wider range of individual constructions.

Younger children can make the spider given a little help – it can be part of a fun learning curve leading up to making knots and bows, and the difficult job of tying up shoe laces.

Other creepy crawlies:

The worksheet shows examples of other creatures: insects, caterpillars, snakes and snails. You can use bumpy or fat craft stems for special effects

 

Its good to know:

Young children will need some help – it’s all about noticing how firmly you need to twist and bend the craft stems so they keep their shape, and adjusting all the wobbly legs so they stand up

Things you need to pay attention to:

• The sharp ends of each stem – make sure the tips are bent over in case young children start to wave them around as pointy swords or wands
• Cutting the craft stems into shorter pieces will wreck any nice scissors, so its a good idea to have some craft snips handy

Special materials/tools you will need:

• There are lots of different kinds of craft stems available: thin, thick, bumpy/wavy, stripy, and glittery – larger packs are much more cost effective, and usually have a good range of colours
• Sew on wobbly eyes which can easily be threaded on to craft stems
• Craft snips and a hole punch

Where to buy:

Hobbycraft have a big range of colourful ‘pipe cleaners’:

http://www.hobbycraft.co.uk/kids/kids-craft-supplies/pipe-cleaners

Sew on 10mm wobbly eyes:

http://www.littlecraftybugs.co.uk

https://www.amazon.co.ukhttps://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=sew+on+wobbly+eyes

Click to view PDF Worksheets:

Creepy Crawlies