DIY Miniature Skeleton

Hey there! I’m Natalie, from TheCreativeMom.com. I’m so excited to show you how my kids and I made these DIY Miniature Skeletons for Halloween.

The first thing we are going to do is cut our skeleton’s arms and legs. We picked up some dowels from The Home Depot, and this is what we are going to use for our skeleton’s arms and legs. You can cut these to whatever size you want, but if you want to cut them the same size we did, you can use this diagram as a reference.

After you’ve got your dowels cut, you are going to sand the ends to make sure they are smooth, without any splinters. We used a 200-grit sandpaper for this.

Now that we’ve got our dowels cut and sanded, we are ready to start assembling our miniature skeleton. We will need to add some knees and elbows. For this, we are going to use some small screw eyes.

Go ahead and screw an eye hook into just one end of each dowel. We will be doing something a little different for the other end of the dowels. You can predrill the ends of your dowels with a 1/16” drill bit to make it a little easier to screw in the eye hooks.

You should have an eye hook at one end of each dowel. For the other end of the dowels, we will need to open up our hooks before we screw them into our dowels.

To open up the hooks, use two pairs of needle nose pliers. Hold on to the hook with one pair of pliers, while you bend the hook open with the other pair of pliers. You’ll need to open up 8 eye hooks for each miniature skeleton.

Now we are going to attach our arms and legs. You’ll take the opened-eye hooks, and connect them to the closed-eye hooks. Once they are connected, squeeze the opened eyes shut with your needle nose pliers. You will leave an open hook for the hand that we will use later.

Now that we have the arms and legs, we are ready to attach them to our bodies. You’ll need a 3-inch scrap piece of wood. I used a 1x2 that I had in my garage. Mine was primed, but just use whatever you have, or pick up a 1x2 board at The Home Depot.

Using a 1/16” drill bit, drill holes where the shoulders and hips would be on the 1x2. We measured in ¾” from each side to drill for our shoulders and hips. But you can just eyeball this, and put the holes where you think the shoulders and hips should be.

Then you’ll use a ¼” drill bit and drill a pilot hole for the head on the top of the 1x2.

Our miniature skeletons are looking so cute, but now we need to give them fingers. You should have an opened-eye hook at the end of your arm, for a hand. Thread 5 little eye hooks onto that opened eye hook to create a hand with fingers. Then once they are all on, close the eye hook with pliers.

You can be finished at this point because your miniature skeletons are functional. But we decided to spray paint ours. We chose black chalkboard spray paint because we thought it would be fun to draw on our skeletons later.

Make sure when you spray paint, that you use caution and have proper ventilation. We spray-painted our miniature skeletons outside.

Once your paint has dried, you can draw on your miniature skeletons. My boys drew ribs and scary skeleton faces. The best part about using chalk is that if you mess up, or if you want to change your skeleton’s face, you can always erase it and start again.