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Make a gorgeous yarn butterfly craft using this simple weaving technique. This is a fun kids craft for Summer or Spring and the finished butterflies could easily be given as a handmade gift.
This yarn craft idea for kids was first published in 2015 and has been updated and reshared for today’s audience
You might also like our braided yarn dolls
We get butterflies all year round here, but lots of people associate them with Spring or Summer. Whatever the season, this woven butterfly is a fun idea for kids to make (probably best for ages 7+) and is great for developing fine motor skills.
Our butterfly craft uses common materials that most crafty people would have at home, and a ‘god’s eye’ inspired technique to create the wings.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about you’d probably recognise a God’s Eye stick weave if you saw it, it’s one of those classic crafts that everybody made back in the day as kids.
You will need
- Craft sticks standard size – 2 per butterfly
- Pipe cleaners – 1 per butterfly
- Yarn in more than one colour
- Beads – 2 small and one larger one for the head per butterfly
How To
Place your craft sticks into an uneven ‘X’ shape as shown below and wind your first colour of yarn around and around, crossing over and winding in the other direction so the yarn holds the sticks in place securely. Then you are ready to begin waving.
Wind the yarn up the sticks a bit, switching into a figure 8 pattern as soon as you get to the gap between the sticks (in the picture below you might notice that I absent mindedly forgot to begin the figure 8 weave straight away, but it doesn’t really matter. There are no hard and fast rules here). To tie the thread off mid-weaveI simply tuck it into the winding so it pokes through like in the image below. It gets packed so tightly that the loose end stays in place pretty well once you begin winding on the next colour.
Begin your next colour and commence the figure 8 weave again. Change colours as many times as you want to before you get to the end of the wing (but the wings are small so the most I changed was three), and then repeat the same pattern on the other side. Below you can see what I mean by ‘figure 8’.
For the final tie-off I made a double knot at the end of the last colour used.
To create the butterfly’s body bend in half a pipe cleaner and wind it around the centre of the ‘X’ shape and twist it as shown below, then thread two small beads onto the bottom and one larger bead onto the top.
Finally curl the top of the pipe cleaner to create two antennae, and you’re done. Easy isn’t it!
Make some more in different colours…
More fun butterfly craft ideas
