This Spider Pinecone Craft is such an easy halloween craft to create. It uses just 4 items and takes maybe 10 minutes per spider. I love that we were able to take a walk in our own backyard to hunt for our perfect pine cones and then make this adorable pinecone spider.
What Items Do you Need to do this Pine Cone Spider Craft?
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The items you need for this are glue, google eyes, pine cones and pipe cleaners.
Glue– For the glue I used tacky glue because it holds better than white school glue but is still a lot safer than using a hot glue gun. Obviously if your doing this with just adults I would do the hot glue gun for speed and ease!
Googly eyes– I just used standard google eyes here and I would not personally recommend the kind with stickers on the back, you need glue for sure!
Pinecones– For pinecones we just gathered whatever we found, we have a variety of pine trees around us so we had lots to choose from. I would recommend finding some cones that are not so brittle as they will break easily when putting the legs on. I would also recommend attempting to find not so prickly pine cones because you do need to grip them a bit when putting the items on. If you do not have access naturally to pinecones you could order some here!
Pipe cleaners– I used standard full-length pipe cleaners but most varieties of pipe cleaners should work. Black pipe cleaners were my first choice but I realized the brown matched my spooky little arachnids better. Depending on your pinecone size you may need cut your pipe cleaner so the legs are not so long. I had big pine cones so my legs were just fine.
How do you make the Pine Cone Spider Craft?
This is honestly such an easy craft. We did it as a fun halloween craft but you could do it all year round with kids of all ages when learning about spiders!
Step 1: Take your pinecone and place your pipe cleaner under the pinecone so it is sticking out evenly on both sides.
Step 2: Pull the pipe cleaner up towards you and then over the top of the body almost like tying it onto the body.
Step 3: Pull the pipe cleaner towards the opposite sides.
Step 4: Bend the pipe cleaners to resemble legs.
Step 5: Repeat with 3 more pipe cleaners.
Step 6: Gather 8 googly eyes and put glue on the back of each.
Step 7: Gently place the eyes in two rows of 4 on the front of the pinecone. (See note for assistance)
Step 8: Enjoy your spooky pine cone spider!
What are some tips to making the Spider Pinecone Craft?
1. My biggest tip is using newer or fresher pincones so that you do not experience a bunch of breakage. Any avid pine cone crafter will tell you that brittle pinecones are hard to use. You can test this by simply pushing on the “petals” and if they break easily it is probably too old.
2. My next tip is to be gentle with the eyes. They were tricky for me to get lined up correctly. I placed them on one spider and then actually intentially broke a few petals off the other pinecone to make a flatter area for the eyes on the next spider I tested. My daughter just placed them however and had a great time so I quite possibly made it to serious haha.
3. Put the glue on the eyes. I actually put it on the pinecone first (as you can see in the TikTok- make video) and it was such a mess.
What are some ways to make this a unique spider pine cone?
I had lots of ideas for personalizing these little guys but wanted to present the most simple verision.
I would recommend maybe changing the eyes from google eyes to pom poms. You could use white ones and place a little black dot inside each of them and that would make them really pop! I also thought about using sticks for the legs but wasn’t sure how easily they would stay with my tacky glue so I chose to go for the pipe cleaners. I thought about trying to do something to segment the spider’s body since we were learning about spiders in a lesson but it felt more time consuming than I wanted to do this go round.
How can you use these spider cones?
The most obvious answer here is to scare people in your house right? Just kidding my 6 year old did make that her go to but we used them as the perfect DIY halloween decorations. They are adorable and so easy we could make a good amount and the pinecones stuck like crazy to our fake spider webs.
Another great idea for this would be to acompany any unit of learning abour spiders so not just fun halloween decoration(s). This is a great craft to talk about spider anatomy, the spider legs, eyes and body can all be discussed and compared to actual spiders. You could add fangs, and other spider chracteristics depending on how deep you go with it.
You could also make these to go in your mud kitchen as a little play piece to have in there or any dramatic play center.
I absolutely loved making these and so did my kids. They will for sure be one of my favorite nature crafts to make every year and possibly multiple times throughout the year.
If you are interested in my spider unit please let me know and if you are looking for other easy halloween crafts be sure to check out my halloween rocks or my spooky bats.
Easy Pine Cone Spider Craft for Kids
This is such a simple halloween nature craft for your kids to make use of all those pine cones they have been collecting!
Materials
- 1 Pinecone
- 4 Pipe cleaners
- 8 googly eyes
- Glue
Tools
- Scissors (optional)
Instructions
1: Take your pinecone and place your pipe cleaner under the pinecone so it is sticking out evenly on both sides.
2: Pull the pipe cleaner up towards you and then over the top of the body almost like tying it onto the body.
3: Pull the pipe cleaner towards the opposite sides.
4: Bend the pipe cleaners to resemble legs.
5: Repeat with 3 more pipe cleaners.
6: Gather 8 googly eyes and put glue on the back of each.
7: Gently place the eyes in two rows of 4 on the front of the pinecone. (See note for assistance)
8: Enjoy your spooky pine cone spider!