I was wanting to make some decorations for outside my house for Halloween this year and one thing I wanted to figure out was how to make a giant halloween spider that could hang from my upstairs window and look pretty spooky!

I found a few tutorials which all seemed to involve buying lots of stuff to make it and as I am on a tight budget I decided to tray and make one with materials I already had at home.

So this is how I made it.

Items you will need:

• balloons
• PVA glue
• old newspaper
• back paint or gesso
• drinking straws
• glue gun

Method:

First of all you need to blow up 2 balloons to different sizes – one for the head and one for the body. The body one can be as big as you can blow it and the head one a bit smaller. You then need to use paper mache to create the head and body.

Rip up the newspaper into pieces around 2-3 inches by 1 inch in size (5-7 cm x around 3cm).

Make up a mix of pva glue and water in a pot – I used about a 1:2 mix PVA to water.

Dip the paper into the glue mix, remove excess and add each piece onto the balloons. Build up a couple of layers on each balloon and then allow to dry. I would say I added about 5-6 layers of paper to make it pretty sturdy. For the body I left some of the bottom uncovered so that the spider would sit flat.

For the legs I used some plastic straws that had been sitting in my drawer for years – I wouldn’t normally have plastic ones but as I say I had these for a long time so thought they would be good to use as they had the bendy bits on them.

I cut a slit in one end of a straw so that it would fit into another straw to make each leg (Ok legs might not be totally anatomically correct but they will do!)

I used 2 straw for each leg and bent them around so that there was a short piece available to fix to the body of the spider.

I also covered the straws in a layer of paper mache and left them to dry before also painting them with black gesso.

I then used a glue gun to fix the head to the body and the legs to the head. You could probably use PVA if you don’t have a glue gun and that should hopefully hold. I cut some slits in the body where the top of the balloon was (I popped the balloon on the body to allow it to sit flat) so that the head could nestle in to the body better.

I then stuck the legs on to the head (in hindsight probably should have stuck them on lower down but I’m sure it will look fine from a distance!).

I’m thinking that I am going to buy some glow in the dark paint to add some eyes or maybe just paint some on in white…