door dangler

Make a door dangler for your room - it'll tell people whether they can come in or not!

You will need:

• a large piece of cardboard box card
  
• a pencil
  
• scissors
  
• sticky tack
  
• a permanent black marker
  
• poster or acrylic paint
  
• a silver pen (optional)
  
• cotton
  
• sticky tape
  

Take a piece of cardboard box card and draw a spider’s web on it. The best way to do this is to draw a cross, and then another cross going diagonally across it, to make the spokes of your spider’s web.

Then, starting a little way up one of the spokes, just draw curved lines to join that spoke to the next one. Then draw another curved line to join that spoke to that one, then another curved line. Keep going all the way round just joining these spokes with curved lines.










When you’ve drawn the web, cut it out.










Put two holes in the web on either side, about 4 cm in from the edge.

The best way to do this is to very carefully push a pencil through the cardboard into some sticky tack.










Next, you need to draw a speech bubble onto more cardboard box card. Draw a large oval, with a little bit sticking out to one side, as you can see here.

Cut this out, and draw round it onto another piece of card.










Cut that one out, and you’ll have two speech bubbles.

You need one speech bubble to face one way and the other one to face the opposite way!










Now decide what you want your door danglers to say in these speech bubbles.

For instance, one could say 'Come In', and the other could say 'Keep Out'. You can have whatever message you like, as long as they're opposites - eg 'Welcome' and 'Stay Out', or 'Enter' and 'Do Not Disturb'.










Now take another piece of card and put the speech bubbles on top. Using a pencil, roughly draw around the speech bubbles as a template to get the shape.

Take the speech bubbles away, and design spiders that are slightly bigger than the pencil guide lines. It's a good idea to make their personalities suit whatever they’re saying.

The idea is that the spider completely covers the speech bubble.










When you’ve drawn your spiders, cut them out, and you’ll have all the parts for your door dangler.










To paint your door dangler, use poster or acrylic paint. Dark colours like purple work best for ones that say 'Keep Out'’.

For the happy spider, you could use happy, bright colours like yellow or pink.

If you want to make your spider look really hairy, then just dab in another colour. This creates a mottled effect on your spider - eg you could use blue with purple, or a darker pink-red on a pink spider.










Once the paint has dried, go over all the features again in black marker, to make them stand out.










Paint the speech bubbles white, and again pick out the lettering with the black marker. Also give them a black border.










For the web itself, paint it black and use a silver pen to pick out the threads.










Lay all your pieces out like this: web at the top, the angry spider underneath it on the left, and the friendly spider underneath the web on the right.

This is just to check that you get everything in the right place.










To assemble all the parts of your door dangler, you need a length of cotton, about one metre long.

Thread the end through each of the holes in the web - in at the front, out at the back, in at the back, out at the front.










Pull the threads down, and tape one end to the back of your angry spider and one end to the back of your happy spider.

Don’t worry about the speech bubbles at this point!










Stick the web to your door with sticky tack, then stick the speech bubbles into position so that when you pull one spider down, one is hidden.

Then if you pull the other spider down, the other speech bubble is hidden.

If you want people to come into your room, pull the smiley spider down to say 'Come In'. And if you don’t want people to come into your room, pull the miserable spider down, so he says 'Keep Out'.








There are lots of different designs you can make!

How about a piece of cheese instead of a web, with a happy mouse saying 'Come In' and a sleeping mouse, saying 'Do Not Disturb' - great if you want to have a lie in!

Or what about a flower instead of a web, with a friendly butterfly saying 'Come In' and an angry bumble bee on top of the flower saying 'Buzz Off'!

Try it yourself!