Keep some plastic bottle caps out of the landfill by recycling them into this fun Halloween craft project — Recycled Bottle Cap Spiders!

These can be used as spooky decorations for Halloween, or add some color for a cute project that kids will love.

Bottle Cap Spiders

Here’s what you need to make bottle cap spiders:

• Plastic bottle caps like you find on gallon milk jugs
• Black paint and paint brush for spider body
• Pipe cleaners for spider legs
• Googly eyes
• Glue (hot glue preferred but kids have more fun with school glue)

Let the kids paint the bottle caps.   My kids love anything having to do with paint.   Is that just because it can be so messy?  We chose to make black spiders so we used black paint.

Next, glue on the googly eyes.   Hot glue works the best because it is neater and dries quickly.   However, my kids were begging to glue the eyes on themselves so I let them put the eyes on with school glue.   It just took a little longer for the glue to dry but it works just as well.

Once the glue is dry, you are ready to put on the spider’s legs.

You will need to cut 2 pipe cleaners in half.   Each pipe cleaner will make 4 legs.   Throughout this project you can talk with your children about spiders so they learn a little along the way.   At this point, we talked about how spiders have 8 legs and that this is one way that you can tell they are not an insect which has only 6 legs.

The final step is to glue the legs to the underside of the bottle cap.   Take your 4 pipe cleaner halves the fold them in half.   Then place them in the underside of the bottle cap.   Cover with hot glue.   I did let my children use school glue for this on our first attempt but it took too much glue, way too long to dry, and wasn’t nearly as strong of a hold as with hot glue so stick with hot glue here if you can.

Now hang your spiders on a spider web and you have a great decoration for your home that your children will be proud to have made.

You can even adapt this idea to make a ladybug by using only 6 legs and painting the bottle cap red with black spots.