As a homage to the millions of tiny caterpillars that ate the tree in my front yard earlier this year, I recently made these crazy caterpillars with my regular group of crafters. This craft was a last minute invention of necessity. I was making up something at 3 p.m. and the kids were expected to arrive at 4 p.m. Ack! I obviously had to use things on hand and kind of fly by the seat of my pants. So this is what I came up with.
Supplies needed:
Egg cartons (I used paper cartons, which allowed the kids to draw directly on them with markers and crayons, but I am sure you could figure out something with styrofoam egg cartons if that is all you have.)
black pipe cleaners (I tend to only give them one option to avoid whining.)
assorted pompoms
glitter glue
markers and crayons
googly eyes
tacky glue or gel glue (white glue didn't hold the pom poms in place, they just slid off)
Remove the lid of the egg crates and then cut the dozen egg spaces in half. I originally made an example that had six segments, but in a last minute panic when we thought that we did not have enough supplies for the incoming crowd, I cut them again so that the caterpillars only had 3 segments. I even cut the examples, so they wouldn't know what they were missing. : ) The shortening of the caterpillars ended up improving the craft, because the kids agonized over how they were going to decorate every inch of their caterpillars. My teen volunteers went through and poked two holes in one segment, to poke the pipe cleaners through. This is much easier than gluing the pipe cleaners and they look they are protruding from the head, as they should be. The rest is just decorating.
