How To Make A Jellyfish

Last year Brother-Bug was interested in jellyfish. We got books out of the library and delved. The eventual result was a large jelly that hung from our ceiling for months.We found it recently and hung it up for our month of studying Oceans and Marine life. It looked really good with our oceanic windows.

It is a very simple project. You will need:
A large piece of bubble wrap
A piece of colorful cellophane (usually sold or found as a gift wrap supply)
Lots of clear or white twist ties
A good plastic bonding glue
Scissors

Optional - a pack of silver rik-rak and small colorful cards.

Cut a large rectangle of bubble wrap - approximately 12"x36". Glue the 12" side together making a cylinder and let the glue dry thoroughly.

Using the scissors, snip holes around the top and bottom of the cylinder, abut an inch down and 3/4 of an inch apart. Thread one twist-tie through the homes, gathering up the cylinder. That's the top of your jellyfish.

Crumple the cellophane and put it in the gathered cylinder. Use a twist-tie to gather the bottom closed. Squish the cylinder flat-ish to make the jellyfish "head".

Cut tentacles out of bubble wrap - about 24" long and 1-2" wide. Use the scissors to poke a hole in one end of each tentacle and around the bottom of the "head". Use a twist-tie to secure each tentacle in place.

Optional Rik-Rak: tie long strings of silver rik-rak to the bottom center, using the gathering twist-tie as an anchor. Some jellies have two kinds of tentacles much like this.

Optional Cards: we wrote some of the facts we learned about jellyfish on small cards and stapled one card to each tentacle.

Hang in a window to catch the light! I imagine how cool it would be to make a lot of these and float them on a large room... Maybe lighting the cellophane with LEDs...

One bubble-wrap jelly fish.