Need ornaments for Halloween ?, why don't you turn polluting plastic bottles into animal figurine: A Spider.

I think we all have the same situations with plastic bottle, what is the best thing we should do after we drink up bottled water. Facing this situation, normally people will end up with :

1. Throw the bottle away and make more garbage in environment.

2. Collect the bottles and sell them after they reach certain amount with another risk may come up: the misuse of those old bottles as containers of other products which is harmful to health, or used by swindlers to make imitation products.

3. Recycle the bottles into other useful forms or products.

I prefer to choose point no. 3 and here is one idea how to change a potentially polluting plastic bottle into something more valuable: Change it into an animal figure which has artistic, educative and economic values.

1. A plastic bottle of 360 ml in volume.

2. Scissors

3. PVC glue

4. White (used but clean) tissue paper

5. Small brush.

6. Paints if necessary.

• Prepare a clean, empty plastic bottle.

• Cut the bottle on 1/3 part from the top (see picture 1). Now you have two parts, the top which will become the head and body, and the lower part which is going to be the base and legs of the spider.
• From the top part, cut the lid screw so that no more thread on it (see pic 2).
• From the lower part, cut on 8 equal parts on the bottle vertically which will make 8 legs of the spider (see pic 3).
• Fold in every leg to form it proportionally like a spider's leg and bend to make some joints of the leg.

The top part which has a curved shape (pic 2) is place onto the middle of the body and secure it with some sellotape to keep it in place so that it becomes like pic 3.

Put some unused stuff like rags or plastic inside the body hole.

Close the hole with small piece of plastic and secure it with sellotape.

When you've done with body and legs forming, you can start covering them with thin white paper using paper mache technique. As I always do, I use some layers of tissue paper glued on the whole body with diluted PVC glue for this purpose.

If you think the paper mache process is sufficient, let it dry in well-ventilated room. I don't like to dry it under the sun for not wanting to change the white tissue become yellowish.

After it's completely dried, you can continue the next steps. Put a mouth and eyes and add textures on its skin.

I also give artificial fur on the legs which is made from dacron fibers. You can find this material at stores which sell aquarium filters. To put fur on each leg, first I cut the dacron fiber into the same size as the spider leg rub it with PVC glue and stick the dacron around the leg right away. Let the glue dry to make the fur strongly sticks on the legs.