DIY Creepmas Spider Ornament

Happy Winter Solstice Halloween friends! I can’t believe we’re days away from Christmas and a new year. I hope that you have had a splendid 2018 and that luck and fortune will be with you in 2019! Speaking of luck…did you know, based on Ukrainian and Germanic folklore, a spider ornament on your Christmas tree will bring you good luck? The legend of the Christmas spider is also said to have been the story that inspired the popular decorating trend of draping silvery tinsel on the tree.

There is an ongoing superstition in Europe that spiders bring good luck – and the Christmas spider legend tells of a widowed mother living in poverty with her children. The children find a pine cone and tend to it with hopes that a tree will sprout in time for Christmas (which it did!). Once Christmas came, they could still not afford to decorate the tree. After the children fell asleep on Christmas, a spider is said to have spun a glittering web around the tree so that when the light hit it in the morning it shone and turned the web into gold and silver –  quite a sight to behold. The family was overjoyed and also were no longer living in poverty from that point on.

To honor this legend and to help you bring a bit of luck into your new year, I’m going to show you how to make your own spider ornament if you do not have one adorning your tree yet! Keep reading to find out how:

You will need:

• Hot glue and a hot glue gun
• Googly eyes (or other eyeball shaped accents)
• Chenille stems
• Scissors
• Ornament

I luckily had a black ornament left over from my DIY Halloween wreath, along with matching black chenille stems (you can use any color you’d like of course – I wanted to do a gold spider, but I had trouble tracking down gold stems).

I trimmed my stems to make the legs (I chose a short let style, but you can make them longer for a daddy-long-legs look!).

I did not actually have googly eyes on hand – but I did have candy eyeballs that worked just as well (I just need to be sure that my dog doesn’t start to lick this ornament so I’ll hang it up high and cross my fingers it doesn’t fall).  I placed and glued the eyes first to give me an idea where I’d like to hot glue the legs on.

I bent the legs a bit to give him some feet and adhered them with a spot of hot glue. I decided I’d name my lucky spider friend Sid (and no, he’s not vicious!).

Sid is a nice lucky addition to the tree just in time for Christmas!

I hope all of your Christmas wishes come true and your new year is bright with possibilities! Thank you for reading, baking, and crafting with me in 2018 and for visiting my blog this year –  your support and the online Halloween community has kept me inspired and I’ve made some awesome friends from all over the world! You ROCK!