Chinese Lanterns

Hello, hi, hello, hello, hi, hello!

Ok, now that I got that out of the way, I am excited to show you my next DIY project! I just recently started interning at the Museum of Arts and Science in McAllen, better known as the IMAS.  It has been really fun and this weekend we celebrated Chinese New Year by hosting a huge event. Along with learning a lot about the culture and all of those fascinating things, I also learned how to make a paper Chinese lantern.  Now, whether this is authentic or not, it was still pretty cook to make.  Everyone that would pass by my station was really interested as to how we were making these cool looking things. I was in charge of helping kids and adults make these lanterns, so that pretty much makes me an expert. Let me just add "lantern maker" to my resume before we begin. :)

Things you will need:

• Paper, any kind, any color
• Something circular that you can trace, (I used a can of peanuts)
• Scissors
• Glue stick
• Hot glue gun
• Thread of any color
• PATIENCE

We'll begin by tracing the circular object that you chose to make your circles.  You're going to need 8 circles for this lantern.  

After this you will cut them out as perfectly as possible

Once they are cut, they are ready to be folded.  You will be folding each circle into a triangle.  I will break this step up a little more because I found that most people had trouble folding the circles into triangles.

First you make one point of the triangle:

then you fold the other side in:

Once all eight circle are folded into triangles, you can start using your glue stick to glue them together.

Start by putting glue on two sides of one triangle:

Then glue three more triangles to your original triangle:

Once you have four triangles glued together, glue them all together:

Repeat the previous step again with the remaining four triangles.

Once you have two separate hut looking things:

GLUE THEM TOGETHER!

After you are done, tie some string into a loop:

and use the hot glue gun the glue it to the top of the lantern.

After that cut several strings the same length and tie them together

Glue these strings to the opposite end of the lantern.

And there you go, you have a Chinese lantern! Go ahead and start taking pictures of your amazing new room decor, upload the pictures to Instagram and make all your friends jealous.

I did this project with kids of all ages and even adults, they all seemed to really enjoy it.  Hopefully my instructions were pretty clear, if not, just follow the pictures!  Thank you all for stopping by! 

- Gabby