Make a DIY Spider Halloween Costume

Every month as the Guidecentral maker in Residence I write a guest blog post and this month it's all about Halloween.

Halloween is approaching fast and the excitement levels in our house are rising as this is by far our favorite season of the year.

We spend weeks discussing and preparing our costumes and what we are going to make and dress up as. It's become a tradition at this stage and it's all part of the fun.
For years and years before we had kids myself and my husband Stuart would throw a huge Halloween party every year for all of our friends and the costume competition would be pretty high. When people realised we really meant business they would go all out and some of the costumes were so impressive over the years, we even used to give away a best dressed prize.

Since then we have been blessed to have two beautiful children and whilst this may put a stop to the huge Halloween party it actually opens up a whole new level of excitement as we get to share all the years of our Halloween experience with the kids and get them involved as much as possibly to share in our passion of making costumes, decorating and celebrating Halloween.

This year my son Harry (4) is obsessed with all things spider related so we decided to make a spider costume. What I love about DIY projects is that they really don't have to cost you anything. Why spend an arm and a leg on a generic shop bought costume when you can have fun making your own and it will be so much more sentimental when you look back over pictures in years to come. I suppose as Harry is still so young I can still get away with the DIY look whereas in few years time it might not be so easy to convince him how cool my DIY costume is and i'm sure he like any other child will want the latest coolest character costume like his friends. So for the moment I'm going to savior this special time with him and his unbelievable excitement over my newspaper made spider costume.

Here's what you need to make it:
Bunch of old newspapers
Scissors
Cellotape
Black Gaffer Tape
1 x Cereal Box


Instructions:
Okay so we all know that a spider has eight legs but for this costume we only need to make six as we are going to use Harry’s arms as two of the spiders legs.
So first things first we need to make the spiders legs. You may have a pile of old newspapers lying about and if not go to your local shop and ask them do they have any old ones. Or grab a pile of free newspapers like I did. I used a medium sized newspaper (same size as the free metro newspapers).

Open the newspaper on the middle page and tear out about three layers from the centre, then position this ontop of the right hand page so that you have a newspaper and then another third.Roll up the newspaper to make a long spider leg. secure in place with cellotape.Do this six times. 

The top quarter of the leg will naturally have a slight bend in it already as this is the third of the paper that we added on at the beginning when we placed the paper before rolling.When you have made six spiders legs, cover them all in black paper and cellotape in place.

To make the body of the spider I used the inside of a cereal box. Cut off one panel of the cereal box. Scrunch up several pieces of newspaper and fill the body of the cereal box.
Cover the cereal box with a black plastic bag and cellotape it in place.

You can now begin to stick on your spider’s legs. Stick three legs on one side and three legs on the other side.Don’t worry if it looks a bit messy on the inside with the cellotape. You are not going to see this part as it will be on his back.

Now we need to make the straps for the spiders legs.

Get a few sheets of newspaper and  fold it horizontally in an accordion style.
Next stick on your straps to the back of the spider’s body. I stuck them on lightly first and tried it on my son to check the positioning of it. It was a little low on his back so I moved the straps down slightly. It was then that I realised that the spiders legs were slightly too long in comparison to the size of my son so I trimmed them all slightly.Once you stick them on then you can cover them completely with black tape.And that’s it! Your spider’s body and legs are complete.

Now find a pair of black trousers or tights and a black top, throw in a bit of facepainting for effect and you have one incredibly scary creepy crawly!