Photo Tutorial: Spiders… love 'em or hate 'em, here's how to make 'em
By Laura Bracken (email@BrackenDesigns.com)
What you will need: • A fat bead and a smaller bead, without terribly small holes • Cheap wire (gardening or craft wire) (5 pieces about 6 inches each) • Seed beads • Bugle beads (um… as you will see, thinking ahead and making sure your bugle beads fit INTO your selected wire is a smart thing) • Wire cutters, round-nose, needle-nose pliers
Step 1: Take a length of wire (4-8 inches) and make a tiny curl at one end; this is the spider's nose and since spiders don't have noses we want it as small and unnoticeable as possible To create a flat effect at either end of the spider, a headpin can be used, rather than a length of wire, but I haven't found any cheapwire headpins fat enough for my liking yet, so I stick with wire for now Step 2: Put the small (head) bead onto the wire
Step 2: Take the other four lengths of wire and make a half loop in the middle of all of them together onto the wire with which you were already working (at this point, you may notice that it was late and I temporarily made my spider an insect instead of an arachnid by giving him six legs instead of eight!)
Step 3: Put the larger (body) bead onto the wire and wire-wrap a loop at the spider's butt end (you can use this for hanging him if you like)… make sure there's no slack or the legs will swing too much
Step 4: Take one of the legs and place a bugle (or tube) bead onto, followed by a seed bead (this is where I discovered that my chosen bugles were too small… or my wire was too thick… and I had to go find bigger holed beads)
Step 5: Continue alternating until you have four large bugle beads (or six smaller ones) on, then end with a seed bead
This is where I discovered my spider was two legs short so I added another wire around his belly. Step 6: Clip your wire with about ½ inch remainder and curl the end up to the beads Step 7: Do this will all the legs Step 8: Now just shape your spider by bending his legs the way you want them
Variations for handing spider: • Do everything the same, but when you make the spider's tail/butt end, make it flat, like the nose, if you don't want a loop for hanging • Invisible fishing line can then be tied onto the loop and your spider can dangle from this "web thread" The legend of the Christmas Spider is a story that begins "Once upon a time, long ago…" and goes on to tell the tale of a woman who put up a Christmas tree in her house the night before Christmas. During the night, the curious spiders crept all over the tree, dancing and playing, and leaving a tangle of gray spider webs all over the branches. When Father Christmas came and saw this, he knew the mother of the house wouldn't appreciate the spider webs, yet he loved the little spiders and didn't want to hurt their feelings by clearing the webs away. So he touched the tree and turned all the gray spider webs into glittering silver strands… which have come to be known as our tradition of hanging tinsel on the Christmas tree.
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