Paper Lantern Tutorials

 I just had a baby and wanted to do a fun light for her room.  I LOVE the idea of fun lights and chandeliers but am too poor and too cheap to do anything for real.  I also love figuring out a fun spin on something and having it turn out awesome.  So I did some research on pintrest and here is my board of some fun ideas I liked.  I didn't find the exact things that some of these people did and I know I wanted a little cluster of lights and wanted three different ones and wanted them to be girly.  Here is what I came up with!

Top globe

I loved the look of the pom poms on the globe but crazy story, Michael's didn't HAVE any and with a new baby who knew when I would actually make it to Joann's to get some.  So I decided a fuzzy one might be pretty cute.  I used hot glue on the top and bottom and strung it pretty tight all around in a circle.  It was going pretty slow, so as soon as I got far enough down I painted it with mod podge and strung it around faster.  It just doesn't dry fast enough or stick enough to do it on the top and bottom. 

I decided that it still needed a little bling to it though.  I thought about adding some pearls to it which of course would be cute but I knew that my bottom globe would be pink so thought I should balance that out.  So I finally settled on stealing one of my daughters play necklaces and cut the beads off.  Awesome, free and I don't have to wait to go to the store to finish this project!

Middle Globe

I bought these on Amazon, but saw them at Michaels also.  This one took me two packages of 30. 

 So I pulled these little delicate things apart and cut them in half to make half circles. 

I wanted mostly only the lace part to show so I tried to overlap them enough so that would happen.  

I hot glued only in the middle of each little doillie. 

 

 I ended up gluing them overlapping about halfway over the one next to it.

I also didn't follow the wires exactly.  Once you make it around and kind of meet up with the first one and tuck it underneath the first one in the row.

 I then skipped up a row overlapping the row beneath.  Does that make sense?

And then continue all the way to the top.  

 Bottom Globe

This one way fairly easy just time consuming.  I ordered these flowers off Amazon and they came already just plain petals.  That was great and saved me lots of time cutting them off of garland or something that you might buy them at a craft store.  I used 2 bags of 200 for a 14 inch lantern.  

I already had these little rhinestones so just used those for an added element of bling.  It took a while to do this but it turned out pretty awesome.  I just made sure I glued them close enough to make it look nice and full.

 I couldn't figure out how to run three wires to these and have it look real neat so I looked into other options.  I decided to use little tea lights.  You have probably seen them.  They are submersible little lights that people use at weddings and things.  They are not very bright, but I wanted this to be more of a mood setter than an actual light.  The great thing is that they work on a remote which I stuck right next to my light switch.   I got these lights and my three lanterns at shopwildthings.com  I used  8 inch, 10 inch, and 14 inch lantern sizes.  Hope this has inspired you to do something creative too!