Yarn Octopus and Jellyfish

The girls were fascinated by the yarn I pulled out yesterday, so I decided to make a couple yarn crafts with them this morning.

The no-sew, no-knit yarn octopus doll idea has been around a long time (I imagine it's from the days before plastic manufactured toys), and is a lot of fun to make.  It ended up being more of a Mommy-craft, with help from the kids rather than something they could do all by themselves.



First I taped one on of the yarn to a box lid, and L (31 months) and I wound the yarn around and around the lid.  It went pretty quickly since we came up with a system where I hand L the ball of yarn and she pulls it around one side of the lid, then passed it to me on the other side, and so on.  We did this for three different colors:

When we felt there was enough yarn on there, I took a piece of pink yarn and tied one end tightly and added a bow.  Then we carefully slid the yarn off the board and tied another piece of yarn around the entire thing to form the head.  L then helped me cut the loops of yard at the bottom.  I divided them into either pieces for the arms (divide in half, then half again two more times):

Each arm needs to be braided.  I tried to show L how to braid by separating one arm into three pieces and then guiding her (put this group over here, put this one over there).  She did ok, but lost interest very quickly, so I finished it up.  This would be a great activity to teach older kids how to braid.

The girls wanted to add googly-eyes to the octopus, so we glued some on.  I don't know how durable they are going to be - you could sew on buttons instead.  Mrs. Octopus was a big hit and the twins fought over who gets to play with her.

While L and I were working on the octopus, E was busy cutting yarn and wanted to create her own octopus.  So I showed them how to make a jellyfish by gluing the cut pieces of yarn on half a paper plate:

I love how cute our underwater friends turned out!

Linking to the Kids Art Explorers Project, whose current theme is Yarn:

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