Cocooning...

I think I mentioned before that the back third of my side yard, that fronts a major road here in town, is going to be Spider Central. Well, to help support that. I built a couple of quicky spider cocoons. 

Supplies needed:

• Old mangled pillow, bubble wrap, air cushions (like what Amazon packs in their shipments)
• This can really be anything that is 18" or so. It just has to be light weight
• Gauze arm sleeves or gauze wrap
• Packing tape
• White medical or athletic tape . Whatever you have handy will work
• White yarn of any thickness (Yes, I raided my wife's pom-pom maker yarn stash. It's fine. Really. She goes to Dollar Tree all the time. Shen can get more...)

To start, I used an old mauled foam nap mat pillow and taped it up in to the rough shape of a capsule pill and then covered it with a gauze IV sleeve leftover from my son's PIC line last fall. If you don't have a couple of these laying around (and most of you won't...) just used the medical gauze. It works just as well to form the base layer of the cocoon. I made the other one using the plastic air bubbles from an Amazon 
package. To get it to stay in the shape I wanted, I took the packing tape and wrapped a couple of layers around the bubbles to hold them in place. I used the second sleeve to cover all the tape up.

Now comes the fun part. I used 2 Dollar tree size balls of yarn, One per cocoon, tp wrap the two bundles I made. After taping the end of the yarn to the base, I just started wrapping it up any which way, leaving enough yarn at the end to allow me to tie at on at one end of the cocoon. Make sure to leave enough extra on top of that so you can have a connecting thread to the main web. This was another really simple build that will look great in the yard.