Bamboo-Crawling Caterpillar From Drinking Straws

While crafts and projects that take detailed planning and a high investment of time and resources are a part of the amazing DIY world, easy-to-do crafts are also a great way of approaching the DIY sphere, especially for beginners, kids or anyone else who wants to make cool stuff with their hands.

Using easily available materials in crafts can encourage others to try and make theirs.

In this instructable, I will show how easy it is to make these caterpillars wriggling on bamboo trees all with drinking straws.

• Bendable drinking straws (Preferably green and yellow ones)

• Scissors / Box-cutter knife

• Glue gun (Transparent sellotape could do)

• Ruler

• Black marker / black colour pen

I've made the bamboo sticks look as close as they can to actual bamboo sticks (in terms of plain looks) as far as using straws is concerned, and it was quite easy.

To make the bamboo stick, take a green (mimicking the colour of a growing bamboo) drinking straw and cut the longer arm of the straw away from the bendable part of the drinking straw. The cut should be made at an angle so the cut edge is slant, we want to get as much detail as we can as there's little detail we could naturally get from drinking straws. Set the green stick aside.

Take a bendable yellow drinking straw and cut away one of its arms where it connects to the bendable part. Now, using either scissors to cut or a box-cutter knife to slice, cut out tiny rings from the folds of the bendable part of the yellow straw. The tiny rings would be inserted into the green stick to make the nodular rings of the bamboo stick.

Cut the tiny rings open and insert them on the green stick spaced reasonably apart, about four rings (nodular rings) per stick.

Using the glue gun, I glued the nodular rings in place onto the green stick at the point where the rings were cut open.

The leaves would be connected through their branches to the bamboo stick.

To make the bamboo leaves, 4cm length of the green drinking straws were cut. Pinched a side of the cut piece in between two fingers and used the scissors to cut out the shape of half of an elongated leaf.

Now open up the cut leaf (it wouldn't easily open up); you can make it flat out by pressing it with an iron in a soft cloth or paper sandwich at low heat. Make about 4 leaves (one for each nodular ring).

To make the branches is super simple, take a 4cm cut of the green straw and cut it into long, narrow pieces.

Take one branch and glue it onto the back of a leaf. Repeat for all the leaves.

As the title of this step shows, it's straightforward, to glue the bamboo leaves to the bamboo stick.

Take a bamboo leaf and hot glue the other end of the branch to the nodular ring.

I've made two more bamboo trunks like this to make a total of three.

Now, to make the caterpillar from drinking straw.

Take a bendable yellow drinking straw and flatten the long arm by pressing it in between two fingers across its length. Do not flatten the bendable/folded part, just the long arm of the straw extending from it. Hold a side of the straw in between your fingers and cut a straight line from the end of the straw till you almost reach the bendable part where, just before it, you make a turn to the side you are pinching.

Now you have a straw with a long prawn-like antenna.

At the area where you made a curve while cutting away the other part (i.e. the broad part just above the bendable part), make a slant cut into it. Be careful not to completely cut off the long "antenna" from the rest of the straw.

The slant cut made above would now be sliced into two with your scissors and then tightly pressed along its length as if pinching to make the two halves curved and look like the tentacles of worms.

Moving on, we'll create the legs for our caterpillar worm.

Flipping the straw to the belly of the caterpillar (which is the folded/bendable region), draw out about half of the folds, and use your scissors to cut about halfway the width of the straw in between successive ridges formed throughout the length of the fold. This cut would make the caterpillar flexible and able to perform the wriggly movements it does.

To get the legs out, cut open every other segment on the belly/underside of the caterpillar into two halves. Each half on each side forms the legs

Adding colours to bring out details.

I used a black colour pen (or a permanent black marker) to make tiny black segments on the tips of the legs and to make the eyes at the base of the two short antennae as well as the small black dots on the length of its body to denote the spiracles.

Finishing the caterpillar and glueing it to the bamboo trunk.

Cut away about half the short arm of the straw on the opposite end of the bendable part.

Take the long "antenna" and fold it backwards feeding it into the hole in the straw to come out through the short arm of the straw/tail of the caterpillar. This strip extending out through the tail on pulling or pushing will cause the caterpillar to wriggle as if it's crawling along a surface.

Now hot-glue the tail of the caterpillar onto the lower part of the bamboo trunk.

After being done with the cuttings and glue, I took my assembled toy and, holding the bamboo with one hand, I pulled and pushed the strip from the tail of the caterpillar worm with the other hand, which made it wriggle as if crawling along the bamboo trunk.

Intriguing!

Thanks for reading.