Make a Toilet Paper Roll Octopus

Start by cutting 8 tentacles of equal width. It’s easier to keep them even than you’d think. Start by pinching one end so that it’s almost flat. You can pinch the sides to make a crease as long as you only pinch one end. Then you just use scissors to cut the tube in half. Make the cut somewhere between half and two-thirds the length of the tube, depending on how long you want the tentacles to be.

Next, rotate the tube 90 degrees and cut again. If you pinched the sides before, be sure to align the tube so that the creases touch. At this point you should have four more-or-less equal “legs”.

From here you just cut each leg in half length-wise, giving you a total of eight legs. Fan each tentacle outward.

Optional: Trim each tentacle so that it’s narrower at the top than at the base.

Also Optional: Roll each leg around a pencil or crayon and release to curl the tentacles upward.

Also Optional: Color the octopus or glue a half-sheet of construction paper around the outside (I recommends trying this before you start cutting out the octopus). Alternately, you could color it with crayons, but I’ve always found coloring a round surface challenging at best.

Insanely Optional: If you have a hole-punch, you’ve also got lots of little paper circles left over. If you have the patience of a saint, you can glue them to the underside of the tentacles and it will look like suckers.

The final step is just to draw some eyes on your octopus. I used white-out and a marker to make mine’s eyes. You can use octopi as decorations for an aquatic themed birthday party, Octopus Day, or Talk Like a Pirate Day celebration!