Thursday, December 11, 2008

Day 15: paper star lanterns

Day 15: We made star paper lanterns inspired by this magazine article! It was by far the hardest thing we have ever tried. But we did it. This whole creation was simply made out of wooden coffee stir sticks, tissue paper, tacky glue, and some jewlery wire. First you need to line up the wooden stir sticks into 2 5 pointed star shapes. This for me seemed the hardest part! Then glue down the tips. It helped to that we wove the sticks together to give it a little extra support. We then wound a little bit of jewlery wire around the ends of both stars at every point. This gives it some stability. We trimed extra stir sticks into 5 sections and put them in between the 2 stars at each of the points to give it some dimension. Then while we waited for that to dry some we watered down some glue to paint on the front. We painted on a thin layer of glue and placed the tissue paper down on top of it and smoothed the whole thing out. After letting it dry some, we cut along one edge of each point and glued that down to cover the points. You have to do 2 opposite ones at a time. I found if I tried to do 2 next to each other it just pulled up the paper from the one I just glued down. Then simply trim all the extra paper, and you have a finished star lantern!

Laying out the stir sticks, and glueing them down
Inserting the inside posts

Glueing the tissue paper and covering the edges
Laying down the top layer of tissue paper

The back view

The finished product!

Back view of finished product

Both of them in the tree in front of the lights

A shot with the flash on to get a better look

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