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It's like living on Spider-Man's street
Comments 0 | Recommend 0Jen Richards is no black widow, but she knows how to weave an intricate web.
Each year, when the air gets cooler and Halloween approaches, this Spider-Woman heads out to her family's front yard in the Indigo Ranch neighborhood of eastern Colorado Springs with a wad of yarn and begins to spin.
"If you want neighbors to talk to you, go in your front yard and weave a web," Richards said. "When I'm late in putting it up, they start calling."
This year's creation has a diameter of about 15 feet and is anchored to the ground, the front porch and the garage.
Neighbors seem impressed.
"It's new to me, and I'm an old lady," neighbor Barbara Patterson said. "A lot of times you get the phony things you can buy at the store - but she goes out with string and makes this. The perfection of the way she does it, it's a true spider's web. You might not think diddly-squat about the darn thing, but I like it."
Richards' arachnophilia started several years agowhen she was living in Idaho, and she and her brother were trying to decorate for Halloween without scaring his kids with graveyards and ghosts. Richards said she watched a nature show that detailed how spiders construct their traps, and she emulates that design - first building the spokes of the web and then the lines across the spokes. After years of practice it takes her only a half-hour to build the web from scratch.
Even though she uses everyday yarn to create the web, nature's design is strong enough that it foiled neighborhood teenagers who thought it would be funny to jump through it.
They failed.
She's even built webs for restaurants and churches.
"I think we all need that release that we're allowed on that one day," Richards said. "We pretend it's for kids, but it's for us, too."
Richards keeps the decoration pretty tame for her two kids, ages 6 and 4. "One year I want to wrap a baby doll in string and put it in the web, but I'm not sure my 4-year-old would understand," she said.
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CONTACT THE WRITER: 636-0226 or bill.reed@gazette.com
