Paper Lantern With Cool Design

This tutorial will walk you through step by step how to make this cool paper lantern. I was pondering on a lighting to make with minimal materials, and I thought of this lantern, which uses only paper, tape and baking parchment. Of course, it also uses LEDs, which I was lucky to have thanks to Christmas, but there is an alternative. If you have a lamp, you can simply place the finished project on top of the lamp and it will also result in a beautiful ambiance. I hope you have your crafting mindset on: lets go.

Materials:

1. paper
2. baking paper/parchment paper (should be easy to find at local store, but otherwise LINK will take you there)
3. tape
4. LEDs (LINK)

Tools:

1. scissors
2. cutter (can use knife or scissors if you don't have one)
3. chopping board (or other support for cutting)
4. pencil
5. ruler

Get one piece of blank paper and draw a dot 1 cm from each edge. Now, join all the dots that are on the same sides to make borders. (simplified: make 1 cm borders on all 4 sides). The borders will be used as space to stick things together later on.

Not going into the borders, draw a pattern of your liking (I decided to go with diagonals, which I think is nice and not impossible). Remember that you will have to cut this out.

Place your piece of paper on a chopping board or other suitable support. Use a cutter, knife or other cutting tool and cut out your desired pattern. In my case, I also decided to attach diagonals in the opposite direction afterwards using my scraps.

The problem with putting LEDs straight into the design is that we will end up with a few bright spots of light. The parchment paper will help diffuse the light and make it smoother.

Place your sheet of paper on the parchment and draw an outline around the paper. Cut out this outline. You will now end up with a sheet of parchment the same size as your paper, which you can stick onto the bit of paper using tape.

Roll your piece of paper into a cylinder (tall and skinny, not wide and short, although you can try it that way). Use tape to attach the two edges that meet together,

Place your cylinder on a new sheet of paper and trace an outline. Cut slightly wide of the outline so as to have a circle slightly bigger than the base of the cylinder. Use the extra size to cut out flaps, and use tape to stick the flaps to the main body to form a lid/underside.

place your LEDs inside your cylinder and voila!

Take a step back, turn the lights off, and take a moment to appreciate what you have just built from a couple things lying around in your house.