Here’s a neat trick I picked up from a great book for kid naturalists published by National Geographic. In The Amateur Naturalist, author Nick Baker suggests using a can of spray paint to collect a spider web. Spiders will often spin a new web each day so collecting their webs dosen’t harm the spider. Just make sure it is not on the web.
We get really huge orb spider webs around our house. They are several feet wide.
I bought a 2 x 3 foot sheet of black poster board and got a can of white spray paint. One morning I had our son spray paint a particularly large and finely spun web right off our porch. This is a great job for a kid because all that matters is that you get one side of the web coated with wet paint. It’s hard to go wrong.
Then you have the kid carefully place the black sheet against the web side of the web. The painted web sticks and then with a scissors you snip the anchoring threads to liberate the now mounted web.
The mounted web shows fine white lines and makes a very nice poster. You can reverse the color scheme and spray the web black against a white sheet. Or red!
