Here’s a beautiful yarn-wrapped snail craft for kids to help exercise their fine motor skills and also help them focus intently on a task for a while!

If you are the parent of a preschooler, have you noticed that it’s hard for your child to hold a pencil properly? Well, you’re not alone – studies show that young children are struggling with pencil grip, attributed to excessive technology use.

So how can you fix this? Easy – give their hand muscles some exercise! There are so many fine motor exercises kids can do to strengthen their muscles and improve their grip. These include activities like paper weaving, crumpling paper as well as working with thin materials like yarn.

Of course, young kids can’t sew or crochet, so we’ve got the next best solution – a yarn-wrapped snail craft! This is a fun, colorful craft that’ll keep kids occupied and entertained for a while.

Contents show

Beautiful Yarn-Wrapped Snail Craft for Kids

Supplies required:

Cardboard or thick cardstock
Yarn in 3-4 colors
Acrylic paint
Paint brush
Pencil
A pair of scissors
Craft glue

How to make the Yarn-Wrapped Snail Craft:

1. Download and print the Yarn-Wrapped Snail Craft template. The template contains parts of the snail, including the body, shell, eye stalks and eyes. Yes, those long things on the snail’s head are eye stalks, not antennae!

2. Trace the parts of the template on cardboard and cut them out. Cardboard is the preferred medium here so that it can withstand all the yarn that is to come later in the craft.

3. Let’s start assembling the yarn-wrapped snail craft! Use glue to attach the eye stalks to the snail’s head as shown below.

4. Now attach the two eyes to the ends of the eye stalks.

5. Time to bring out your paints! Paint the snail any color you like and leave it to dry. We’ve chosen a neutral color so that the colorful shell can stand out.

6. We’re moving on to the highlight of our yarn-wrapped snail craft – the shell! Use a pencil and ruler to measure and mark points on the circumference at 1 cm gaps.

7. Take your scissors and cut 1 cm deep slits along the marked points.

8. Now comes the fun part of your yarn-wrapped snail craft – wrapping the yarn! Take a yarn ball in a color of your choice and insert one end of the yarn through any one of the border slits.

9. Turn the shell cutout to the other side, so that the end of the yarn is not visible. Now insert the remaining yarn into another slit on the opposite end of the circle.

10. Continue repeating the previous two steps, wrapping the yarn all over the circle, inserting through the multiple slits any way you like.

11. Once you’re happy with the yarn texture, bring the remaining yarn back to where you started – where you have the first open end of yarn – and secure its open end in the back with some glue. Start the same process all over again with yarn of a different color, criss-crossing over the previous strands.

12. When you’re done with the second yarn, cut it off and secure it in the same place as in the previous step.

13. You can do another round of yarn-wrapping with a 3^rd or 4^th color of yarn. For each color, secure the starting and ending on the same side as the yarns used earlier. This way, you’ll have a shell that’s neat on the front, and all the yarn ends are in the back.

14. Time to assemble our yarn-wrapped snail craft! Bring back the painted snail body and attach the yarn-wrapped shell on the snail’s back with glue.

15. Wait, we’re not done yet! Use a brown or maroon marker to shade in the eyes and eye stalks. While those are the official eyes of a snail, here we’ll draw some eyes with a black marker on the snail’s ‘face’ – just to make it cuter! Use the same marker for a smile and a pink marker for the cheeks.

That’s it – your yarn-wrapped snail craft is complete!

Now tell me, have you seen a more well-dressed snail? We certainly haven’t! We love that you can make this craft over and over again, using different combinations of colored yarn. In fact, this can also turn into a lesson on color theory!

If you’re interested in trying out more snail crafts, check these out: