Happy Birthday to The Very Hungry Caterpillar…

by Amy Simpson

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I work in a nursery as my day time profession and to celebrate the birthday of The Very Hungry Caterpillar by Eric Carle, we were set the challenge of making our rooms Hungry Caterpillar themed. In true Amy style, I decided to go all out! I got the crochet hook and sewing machine out and got Pinterest’ing ideas which I spammed my fellow pre-school co worker with (who sent me loads back and was just as excited) as well as a whole load of exciting activity ideas.

Making Bunting …

I was browsing through The Wool Warehouse website and came across a whole load of Hungry Caterpillar fabric, I got very over excited and ordered wwwayyyyy too much. It arrived and I decided to make it into bunting. I cut all of the triangles our and then realised I had nothing to hang them off, que an emergency trip to Pear Tree Yard craft shop (Pear Tree Yard is a lovely little local craft shop which I love!) to buy some cotton bias binding. I went for pale green, purely because they didn’t have enough of the white.

I spent a long time sat on the floor clipping and pinning my triangles to the binding and had a very happy couple of hours, sewing them on bit by bit.

Really pleased with the finished product, although next time I will definitely use a template to make the triangles neater.

Making my Outfit …

Of course, when I was told we were dressing up, I jumped at the chance and got straight into thinking of how I could do my costume. I found an old Cubs top, which I sewed some of the fabric from the bunting on. I cut out a couple of the bits of the fabric to make little “badges” and sewed them on, simple. To finish it off, the day we were dressing up was a Wednesday, so I looked at what the caterpillar ate on a Wednesday and made myself 3 felt plums. I figured that if I wanted to wear it again, it might not be on a Wednesday, so I made the fruit detachable with velcro so I can change it if I need to. Had such a good time coming up with this outfit and I loved wearing it too. I bought the tutu and green leggings that I wore underneath from amazon and also bought some plain headbands, I wrapped some spare fabric around the headband and tied some yarn around to secure it. To finish off my look, I added some pipe cleaners as antennae’s.

The Main Event; Crocheting the Caterpillar

Now, for the main event…. the crochet caterpillar. I was looking on Pinterest for knitted/crochet Hungry Caterpillar and came across this lovely blog where a lady had adapted a pattern to crochet a caterpillar that turns into a butterfly;

(https://www.wishesintherain.net/2015/02/what-i-made-hungry-caterpillarbutterfly.html?m=1 I), I was so inspired to make my own and was excited to get started. I raided my yarn stash for the perfect colours to match the colours in the book and got crocheting.

I bought the pattern from Etsy and you can purchase it here . The pattern was amazing, it was so clearly written and so easy to follow and I really enjoyed the challenge of changing the colours to match the book, the butterfly part was especially challenging to match the colours.

My favourite place to crochet and craft is the garden. It’s peaceful and pretty and I love to admire the hard work I’ve put into making the garden pretty.

My most favourite thing about this project was that the caterpillar turns inside out into a butterfly.

I’m so chuffed with the finished project. I took it to work to go with my puppet theatre in the pre-school room. The children have loved it, although the buttons are a bit tricky, so they had to ask for help to change it into a butterfly/back again. But I guess you can say that’s promoting some good communication and language skills.

We set up a whole range of Hungry Caterpillar themed activities in my pre-school room and really went all out with the theme with my crafty bits to add to it.

Here are some of the activities we set up…

I hope you feel inspired by my crafts based around The Very Hungry Caterpillar. 🙂 Would love to see if you try any of them in the comments and to see your creations.

Happy Crafting 😀