Spiderweb Door

We love Halloween and this year I wanted to make something to decorate the glass door in my kitchen. We came up with a spider and her web door that still let light through but made the kitchen more Halloweeny.

What you need:

• plastic tablecloth - We got a white 54" x 108" tablecloth for $1 at Dollar General
• paint and/or permanent markers - We used black and red acrylic paint that we had as well as a black permanent marker. We also used a watercolor marker to draw the spider before we painted it.
• paint brushes -We had paint brushes
• assorted decorations - We had gotten Halloween rings on clearance a couple years ago for $0.50
• glue (optional) - We used a hot glue gun that we had but other types of multi-purpose glue would probably work too
• newspaper or other material to protect your work surface

Altogether, I think we only spent about $3 on this project. Now, on to the fun stuff...

• First measure your door, or window, or whatever space you are planning on covering with your spiderweb decoration. The glass part of my door was approximately 2' x 5'. Spread out your tablecloth onto a flat surface so that you can measure and cut it to size. I cut a 2' wide strip off the bottom of the tablecloth. You can save the rest of the tablecloth for another use/decoration.
• Get out your brushes and your paint. We used black and red acrylic paint. For the web, we used brushes that were about 1/4" wide. For the spider we used smaller brushes, 1/4" wide and a narrow round brush for the spider legs.
• Get our your decorations. We used spider rings. I used fingernail clippers to snip off the ring band so that I just had the spider left.
• Get out your glue gun and cardboard, newspaper or a paper plate, etc to protect your surface from dripping glue.

Before you begin creating, protect your work surface. We used extra newspaper under the edges to keep the paint from getting where it's not supposed to be.

Now that you have your supplies out and your surface ready, you can paint or draw your spider web. It was easiest for us to start with the straight lines that anchor the spider web. Once those were painted, we used gentle curves to connect each line to the lines on either side. Every spiderweb is unique so this does not have to be perfect.

Once the spider web is finished you can move on to the spider. We painted a line down from the web because we wanted our spider to be suspended from her web rather than sitting in it. Using a watercolor marker, we drew a spider and then painted over it with the black and red paint.

Once she was painted, we added the baby spiders to the web. Before gluing we placed the small spiders around the web until we were happy with their placement. Then we used the hot glue gun to put a small drop of glue on the back of the spider, allowed it to dry for about 30 seconds so that it would not melt the tablecloth, then replaced the spider on the web. We placed a few of the spiders between the strands of web so that it looked like they were practicing making webs of their own. We used permanent marker to draw their webs onto the main web.

To hang up our spider and her web, we used double-sided tape in each corner to tape it over the glass window on our door.