A very dear cousin,Tosha, is having a precious baby boy later this year, and her sister Holly, who is hosting the baby shower and who is also a very dear cousin, asked me to help with the decorations. Yay!! What fun to be able to create with an actual purpose instead of just creating for creation's sake. As soon as she asked, the paper lanterns that I made for a previous post popped into my head.
Her baby shower colors are blue and brown, so those were the colors used for the lanterns. I decided to use brown for the lantern body and blue die cut flowers for the color punch. !!!POW!!!
The first few steps in this process are rather boring. Cut several 8.5" x 11" sheets of card stock paper in half and then cut as many 8.5"x1/2" strips out of each halved piece as you can.
Because the flower die is small the blue card stock paper had to be cut in the same manner. I used 6 pieces of brown card stock and only 2 pieces of blue. All total I made 13 lanterns.
Punching paper flowers is the most time consuming part of this process, but it's fun so no matter.
Lots of strips and flowers....and this was not all of them...
Okay, so some steps were left out, but if you refer to the previous post on paper lanterns, you will get a better understanding of these steps. Basically, you punch holes at the end of every strip, place 11 strips together aligning the holes. Next just put a brad though each hole in order to hold the strips together a start pulling the strips around starting at the bottom of the stack.
At first they will look strange; just keep pulling them around and shape them up once your finished.
Next, use some double stick tape, glue, or Zots (that's what I used and they are fantastic) to apply the flowers onto the lanterns and your nearly finished.
Since I'm not sure how my cousin Holly wants to use these, I put ribbon under 1 strip and tie it in a knot at the end to make a ribbon loop for hanging. If she does not want to hang them, we can just cut the ribbon off.
I took several pictures because I could not get them to look as cute in the pictures as they are in person.
In person, they look good enough to eat!
These are just a few. All of them would not fit in the picture. (I'm still using my iPhone's camera.) I hope Holly and Tosha like them!! For a really good tutorial on how to make the basic paper lantern/balls/ornaments visit
2 comments:
I really like these decorative globes. And there could be many uses for this type of craft. Thanks for the instructions. Very well done blog :-)
These are a super cute idea! I am making them for my baby shower with teal balls and yellow flowers. I ended up making the strips 8-1/2" x 1" and using 12 strips per ball, as I found they look better. I also put the ribbon at the top of the ball using the brad rather than attaching it afterwards, so it would hang correctly. Great idea!
Post a Comment