#33: Davy Bones Spider

I've made a similar spider to this that is currently on Etsy, but I wanted to make one for my 365 Spiders project. When I was in about 4th grade, my sister's grandpa visited with a big box of miscellaneous things from the Salvation Army that he thought we would like. Among the things was an outdated 6th grade English textbook that I was immediately smitten with. I can particularly remember reading an excerpt from Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island about the Black Spot and trying to memorize the pirate verse: "Fifteen men on a dead man's chest, yo ho ho and a bottle of rum...."

Before Disney made pirates famous, we had classic books and horror stories about them. My favorite book of scary stories that I would check out from my school library over and over (and eventually purchased a personal copy of) was Whistle in the Graveyard: Folktales to Chill Your Bones by Maria Leach. The Davy Bones spider is pictured next to an ink drawing of Blackbeard's ghost from a story by the same name in that book. All of the ink drawings are twisted and weird, and Whistle in the Graveyard is the creepiest kids' book I own.

Materials: carved bone beads, plastic "bone" heart bead, bamboo bugle beads, amber E beads, black seed beads, silver wire