Reed and Paper Lantern

This project was a somewhat long process because of the amount of waiting that goes into it, reeds took many hours to dry, the glue usually took about 30 minutes or so to dry. But it all started with an image in my head and the original sketch.

For the project you will need wooden reeds, tissue paper, a wooden board, thumb tacks, watered down glue, hot glue, and regular paper for your sketch/outline.

It all started with this one freehand sketch, I used a large piece of paper and taped it onto a large wooden board of the same size.

For the second step, I aligned wet, bendable reeds with the image on the paper. I used the lightbulb sketch to make 2 lightbulb shaped reed pieces. I freehanded the circular hoops that went inside the lightbulb and held them together with clips.

After the process of shaping, and drying the reeds, I would next begin to hot glue all the shaped reeds into the structure of the lightbulb. This process was probably one of the harder steps, I even tied fishing line at certain points to make sure the structure was 100% sturdy.

For this step, I one by one glued tissue paper pieces over each individual section of the bulb using a watered down elmers glue, once i glued over the surface, i shaped and pulled the tissue paper over the reed.

For the final step, I fed a fairy light string in through the bottom of the lightbulb and taped the small battery pack on the bottom.