Paper Lantern (cheap and Cheerful)

Hello there,

New year, new studio and hopefully lots of new instructables for you.

Kicking things off with and easy, cheap and cheerful paper lantern. I did a lot of these on the run up to the festive period and they were a hit with children and adults a like.

As well as a pictorial instructable there is a video at the end

Lets begin.

What you will need

Materials

Card (I'm using white but any colour will do)

Double sided tape.

An electronic tea light.

All of the above I got from the pound shop, the card was a bundle of 30 A4 for a pound and the tea lights came in packs of 4.

Tools

Scissors

Cut your card to a size you feel is a nice height. I'm cutting this one to roughly A5 in size but you can make yours as tall or as short as you wish. In fact have a few all different heights looks really nice when they are lined up.

Fold a tab at one end roughly 1cm and attach a strip of double sided tape to the tab (if the tape is too wide you can trim it down) and peel off the plastic

Fold the card in half and stick the edges together. Then fold it in half again.

Now that you have that folded your card you can get creative.

If you remember making paper snowflakes in school, its exactly the same principle, the only thing you need to keep in mind is NOT TO CUT all the way across other than that go wild. (remember it doesn't need to be christmassy. you could use black card and do something halloweeny)

When you are done cutting it out open it back up.

Take your tealight and put a bit of double sided tape on it. You dont need to do this but i feel it adds a bit of weight to the bottom to help hold them in place.

And there you go!

As always I hope you enjoyed this instructable and as always, thoughts, comments and even photos of your own paper lanterns are welcome in the comments section below.