sea creatures | Today We Did

These wonderful jelly-fish were made using a paper bowl and scraps of various yarns, cotton, and ribbons. The ribbons were all collected from gifts we had been given for birthdays last year and were just sitting in the craft box awaiting their final purpose. It’s great when we can re-use something like that in our craft pursuits.

Painting the top of the jelly-fish.

We ended up making three jelly-fish. First we painted the bowls, L picked orange, A picked blue and purple. I ended up finishing off the purple one though, as A got a bit tired of using the tiny detail brush she’d decided to paint with. She chose a much thicker brush for the blue paint, which allowed her to paint the bowl more quickly and easily.

While the bowls dried we sorted out our tentacles. I thought the jelly-fish would look better with tentacles of varying lengths, so I wasn’t very particular about the length of the pieces as I cut them up. I placed the tentacles into two piles, one for each child, so that they each had a range of different tentacles to choose from. I ended up needing to cut more yarn up as we ran out before we had finished. Some of the yarn was feathers, and some was a powderpuff yarn that was fluffy. I thought these yarns looked really good on the jelly-fish, and it gave them a bit more variety and texture, than if we’d just used plain yarns.

Taping on tentacles.

Attaching tentacles.

To stick the tentacles onto the bowl, we used sticky tape. The kids made bundles of several tentacle pieces together in some sticky tape, and then they taped that to the inside edge of the bowl. I found that it was easiest to use a longer length of tape, stick the tops of the tentacles along it, and then fold it over to form a rectangle of tape housing a number of tentacles, and then tape that section into the bowl. We continued doing this all the way around the edge of the bowl to give the jelly-fish a good coverage of tentacles.