Supplies for Making Paper Lanterns

Series Summary

Sometimes a plain old lamp shade is just too boring. Sometimes a lamp owner has to take lamp decorating into her or his own hands. Sometimes a lamp owner must become an artist and decorator and fashion their own lamp shade. Creating a custom lamp shade is not as hard as you might think. In fact, it may take you less than half an hour to make a custom lamp shade - depending on the design and the materials. If you would like to learn how to make your own custom lamp shade, you can learn for free from one of our experts.

While not necessarily a lampshade, but possessing the same aesthetic effect, a paper star lantern is a crafty, unique, and interesting way to do decorative lighting in your home. In this free video series, a trained artist will show you how to make a paper star lantern, from gathering supplies and folding paper to drawing outlines and attaching star points. You'll also learn how to add light holes, decorate the star, and add lights to the lantern. With these art video instructions, you can forget about the same boring lighting in your house. Make a paper star lantern today!

Video Transcript

"Hi, I'm Melina, and welcome to Expert Village. Today we're going to learn how to make a paper star lantern. For our first step, we're going to gather the materials we need for our project. You're going to need five pieces of parchment or wax paper. The reason why you need this type of paper instead of regular paper is because at the end of making our lantern, we're going to put a bulb inside of it, you don't have to put a bulb inside of it, but since it is a lantern, and you probably would want to see the beautiful light flowing through it, you're going to need to use something that's different than just regular plain type of paper. So you're going to go ahead and use parchment paper or wax paper since it has this waxy coating. And you can make this essentially any size you want, but I am using an 8 1/2 x 11 size. You're going to need a ruler, for measuring all of our straight edges. We are making a star, and you don't want it to come out bumpy, so we're going to use a ruler. You're going to need scissors for cutting out the parchment paper, a pencil. You're going to need a paintbrush, paint (any color of your choice), and you want to make sure when you pick your color it's a light color. If you pick something that's too dark, once you put the light bulb inside the lantern, it's not going to shine through. So you want to get something light, like a yellow or an orange. Then you need any supply that you want for decorating. I am going to use a Sharpie marker and some glitter. You need a hole punch, a single hole punch, not the triple one, you need a single one, and you're going to need some glue. And you can use just regular glue stick as long as it's a good one that holds on pretty well, some of them I know don't work as well, this one works pretty good so you want a strong glue stick, and you definitely don't want the type of glue that you squeeze and comes out because it's going to be too heavy."