Tarantula Puppet Craft

How to make a Tarantula Puppet

Science fair projects-love them or hate them ?  I'm new to them.  My eldest, Mr. Black Licorice, was assigned a project for school.  He is to present a Bug to his class.  To make the presentation more interesting he is to make a puppet of the bug.

He chose a spider but to make it more interesting we narrowed it down to the Mexican Red Legged / Knee Tarantula.  

Here is our process:

Supplies for Project

Supplies we used :

Foam Egg Shape: 1 bigger 1 smaller

Styroglue 

Black Acrylic Paint

Red Acrylic Paint : For the Red Legs

Stringy Yarn: it will depend on the spider. I could only find brown and we just used the acrylic black paint to paint the yarn.

Pipe Cleaners

Googly Eyes

Sharpe Stick(to join to styrofoam balls together )

Random Plastic for the fangs

Process:

First I had my son paint the styrofoam eggs black.

Painting foam eggs

While they were drying I had him paint the yarn . 

When the eggs were dry I inserted the stick to hold the 2 pieces together.

Next we worked on making the legs.  I showed him how to wrap the yarn around the pipe cleaner .

Wrapping yarn around pipe cleaner for legs

Then insert pipe cleaner into foam egg where you want the legs to go and add a a little bit of glue in hole( very small hole ) and place pipecleaners back and leave to dry .

Legs added

Now we had to make it look more like a Mexican Red Legged.  Note to self: maybe try Red pipecleaners and if lucky stumble across perfect red yarn.  

What we did.  I had my son paint the legs red as best he could and also added the red to the foam egg.

Googly Eyes Added

He glued the googly eyes on and added additional yarn to the back by using the glue.  Doesn't look too creepy !  Actually looking cute.  Now for the fangs.  Can't forget those.

We decided to use this old plastic handle from I have no idea.  My husband keeps things for just such occassions.  I did the cutting of the plastic.  Please use caution-my child is 7 so I would suggest adult help with that part.

Fangs were added

Made a very little hole for the fang and then placed glue in it and reinserted plastic fang.  Added a few strands of yarn around fangs with the glue as well.

At the back insert 2 pipe cleaners for spinnerets.

My son's Mexican Red Legged Tarantula Puppet

And here is our Mexican Red Legged Tarantula Puppet.  My son named her Lolipop because she is on a stick.

We are also making replica of her burrowing hole for the science fair project.  That is in another post.  Off to make paper mâché .

I hope this may help any parents out there who are helping their children with projects.

Bonnie