Kid’s Crafts Easy Polymer Clay Octopus

Arts and crafts are a great creative outlet for kids. These type’s of activities teach children fine motor skills, how to read, spell, solve problems and to have patience. Crafting doesn’t have to be expensive and your projects don’t need to take a week to complete. When dealing with children its best to offer them quick and easy things to do.

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My 11 year old granddaughter enjoys working with Polymer Clay. It’s a fun crafting medium to get into. Plus, it’s affordable and you don’t need a slew of supplies to enjoy it. You can use air-dry modeling clay or oven-baked. Young children will need to be supervised while older children won’t need the hands-on approach.

You can swap out the colors and turn it into a black spider for Halloween and shape the 8 legs a little bit differently. You can make it sweet looking or creep him out!

Kid’s Crafts: Easy Polymer Clay Octopus

1 Pkg. Gray, White, Black Polymer Clay
Rolling Mat or Plastic Placemat
Plastic Butter Knife

We used a 2 oz. block of gray Polymer Clay and scrap pieces of black and white. You don’t need a lot.

Work the gray Polymer Clay between your hands to make it soft and pliable. Split it into 2 halves. You’ll roll the first half into a ball to serve as the head. Split the second half up into 4 even sized balls. Roll each ball out into a log shape. Each log needs to be the same diameter and length. You should have 4 logs.

Lay the logs out in a criss-cross pattern, over-lapping in the center. Push down to get them to adhere to one another. They will serve as the Octopus’ legs. Place the round ball on top and push it gently into place.

You’ll need to roll out two small-sized white balls to serve as the eyes. Flatten them and place them onto the face. Roll out two smaller-sized black balls to serve as the pupils. Flatten them and place them on top of the white eyes.

Use a plastic butter knife to make a smile (mouth) on the face. Use that same butter knife to make slight indentations on each of the legs. Use your hands to gently shape the legs to make them look more realistic…like he’s swimming in the ocean’s water. (see photo above for guidance).

We used oven-bake Polymer Clay in our project. We turned the temperature down to 170 degrees F. Placed our Octopus on a glass baking sheet and baked for 35 minutes. Remove from oven and let cool on the baking sheet. It should now be hard. That’s it…you’re done!

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