Lanterns from recycled materials

I love using recycled materials to make stuff, and lanterns are so cool coz it looks so awesome when the candles are lit up in them. I can't claim all the credit of course - I've had inspiration! Especially from these few blog posts from Hai Fang's blog :)

• F15 Jet Lantern & Army Tank Lantern
• NASA themed lanterns! Rocket, Lunar Rover etc
• Another awesome aeroplane lantern
• Pixar Cars lanterns 

Our lanterns aren't really in the league of those in the links above. But I'm happy enough with them! I help the kids with the structure, but the kids do all the painting required. I like crafts where the kids actually get to do something, rather than wait around for Mummy to complete them.

Here are the lanterns we made this year for the 2013 Mid-Autumn Festival :)

Technically, we made the plane above last year. But we didn't paint it last year, so I decided to give it some colour this year. Also, it kinda of turned out looking like a bird instead of a plane (It's a bird, it's a plane, okay okay, I'd try doing a Superman next year!). So I figured maybe if I paint it green, it'd look like an army plane? Plus Shawna had mixed up her yellow and blue so we had this army greenish paint there... and so she happily painted it green... I like how it turned out :) definite improvement!

 

This one above is made from takeaway salad bowls from The Salad Shop. I'd accumulated some when I was working in town in the past couple of years in my previous job. I loved the unique shape of the container and thought it would make a cool lantern. Got the kids to paint its insides. Stuck a quarter of a toilet roll in the bottom half to hold the candle in place. Wait till it dries, put in the string, and voila! Love this lantern! :)

This one above was actually partially inspired by Mum in the Making, her post got me thinking that actually a lantern is just a frame with sides, and just figure out a way to put in the candle, and we're all done! So what I did was to actually use a plastic bottle for the bottom of the lantern. The plastic sides of the bottle was split so as to form the square base - I folded the corners of the plastic sides and just stapled the paper to the folded ends. The paper is actually magazine paper, so you can actually use your favourite artist's picture, or even use nice wrapping paper, or drawing block paper with the kids drawings/painting on them. Anything goes! After I put in the string, I found that the top folded in, not maintaining the blockish shape - so I pasted ice-cream sticks at the top on all four sides(see bottom right hand corner picture). And the most ingenious part of this lantern that I like is... you can unscrew the red cap, stand a candle in it, light it, and screw back the cap with the candle lit in it! :p hehehe...

So those are our lanterns this year. Happy Mid-Autumn Festival! :)