If you want to create a particularly inviting, romantic and cozy atmosphere with your home decoration in no time, you can easily achieve this with a little candlelight. If you don't just want to decorate indoors, but also want to set beautiful accents outside in the garden or on the balcony, it's best to make lanterns. Be inspired by the following creative and simple ideas for making your own lanterns.
What materials can you use for crafts?
You can make incredibly beautiful lanterns from various upcycling materials, such as glass or cans. Preserving jars, with or without lids, jam jars, mustard jars, baby food jars, and old drinking glasses are the ideal craft material for your fascinating, homemade tea lights.
You can decorate with candles for absolutely any occasion and all year round so that you can create beautiful, atmospheric accents with the candlelight. Lanterns made from preserving jars are incredibly versatile with the right decoration, they give the candles a secure stand and showcase the candlelight in a wonderfully beautiful way.
Make simple lanterns for Halloween
Are you looking for a fun and spooky table decoration for Halloween that can be made easily, quickly and without any materials? Atmospheric lanterns can be made in no time and even if you're too scared, they bring warmth and coziness with them. All you need are empty jam jars and the matching stickers. Colorful bats, spiders, ghosts or pumpkins create the desired festive, frightening atmosphere.
Decorate for winter
A lantern with a winter theme can be made just as easily with the right motifs. At Christmas, for example, you and your children can make pretty lanterns with glittering, silver, gold and, why not, colorful stars and snowflakes. These little masterpieces bring a festive atmosphere and also make great gifts.
Use old drinking glass
Do you have old drinking glasses at home that you no longer use? You can make beautiful lanterns out of them and decorate them according to your taste. Using stencils or a string and colored varnish, interesting motifs can be depicted on the glass. Wrap the glass with the stencil, spray it with paint, let it dry, remove the stencil and admire the play of light.
Painting oriental patterns on glass
If you like painting, you can decorate a lantern with magnificent ornaments and conjure up a special and mysterious decoration in an oriental style. You can make unique glass lanterns yourself with playful, elaborate, colorful or geometric patterns.
Make a lantern with tracing paper
You can also make great creations with your children using tracing paper. For beautiful, colorful flowers, you need to cut the tracing paper into several pieces in the shape of a leaf and coat the glass with paste. Glue the pieces in the desired shape and your lantern is ready.
Use the napkin technique
You can also make beautiful lanterns using the napkin technique. Older children can also take part in this project. The first thing you need to do is separate the colored layer of the napkin with the desired motifs from the rest. Coat the glasses with glue, carefully stick the napkin pieces on top and brush the glue over them again with the brush.
Decorate lanterns with colorful adhesive tape
If you want to spice up small lantern glasses, you can quickly and easily make pretty decorations on the glass using colorful adhesive tape. Even if you don't have much time, the multi-colored and patterned stickers are a great alternative.
Decorate tea lights with colorful adhesive tape
A strip of tape with tiny dots or flowers doesn't change the candlelight, but it does create a colorful and cute decoration. Instead of sticking on the transparent glass, you can decorate the tea lights yourself with the colorful adhesive tape. Several different tea lights will look great and are ready quickly.
Make colorful lanterns with foil
You are welcome to cover the lantern glasses with foil and add beautiful colored accents to the room. If you want to enjoy a special candlelight, you can cut out certain figures in the foil. A big heart or star just looks great. By the way, you can also use LED tea lights or small fairy lights.
Make magical decorations with lace
Beautiful decorations for your homemade lanterns can also be made from the particularly delicate material lace. They look particularly delicate and romantic and are therefore ideal as wedding decorations. Wrap the lace ribbon around the glass and cut it accordingly so that the ends overlap slightly.
Attach the tip with the hot glue gun. If you want, you can tie a colored ribbon or decorate the lantern with small butterflies, hearts or other patterns. Once you've decided on a color theme, you can use the ribbon or the mason jar to add color. Lace in black looks very elegant and dramatic.
Make a summer lantern with shells
Did you collect a lot of shells on the beach during your last summer vacation? With pearl-colored shells you can achieve great decorative effects and take that holiday feeling home with you. Decorating lanterns with shells doesn't take much time and the results are fascinating. Preferably use glasses with a straight surface so that the mussels stick better.
Run the hot glue gun around the shell pieces and cover the edges with glue. Briefly hold the mussels with your finger. The other pieces are also attached all around. You are welcome to fill the glasses with sand and make a great Mediterranean lantern.
If you have leftover candles at home, you can conjure up romantic mini tea lights in shells and use them instead of tea lights. Melt the leftover candles in an old pot, put the candle wick in it and tie it to a wooden stick so that it stands straight.
Make your own scented herbal candle in a mason jar
You can now fill the shells with the warm wax and once the wax has hardened, shorten the wick. In the same way you can make an aromatic herbal candle. For larger tea lights, you can get wax lentils from the craft store and add thyme or lavender sprigs to the preserving jar.
Decorate the lantern with wine corks
If you want to create a lantern with a vintage look, you can create a great decoration with wine corks. Use a larger glass vase with a pillar candle as a lantern. Distribute the corks around the candle. A real eye-catcher is ready in no time.
DIY idea with floating candles
You can create a light and enchantingly beautiful lantern with floating candles. You can create enchanting works of art from any glass vessel using floating candles in a wide variety of shapes and colors. These tea lights are a real, elegant and chic eye-catcher for a banquet table. For a great and romantic wedding, candles in the shape of roses or hearts are suitable as the centerpiece at the guest table.
You can give your luxurious lantern even more shine with various decorative stones, glass lenses or diamonds. You can also decorate a large glass jar with fruit and a smaller one with petals or beautiful underwater flowers.
Decorate the glass with book pages
If you have old newspapers and an old, useless book at home, you can create tea lights with a great design using printed paper. Simply tear up a book page and stick the pieces of paper onto the walls of the glass. Paint the paste over it with a brush and let the glasses dry.
If you want, you can cover the lantern with a whole piece of the book page in which you have cut out a heart or any other figure. You can also make an attractive and fragrant lantern with slices of dried fruit, which you also attach to the inside of the glass vessel.
Make an autumn lantern
If the dull weather outside has a negative impact on your well-being and mood, you can decorate tea lights in autumn with natural materials left on your doorstep. Cones and colorful autumn leaves, berry branches and natural paper also make this autumn decoration a great gift.
Decorate winter lanterns with sisal
You can decorate larger glass vessels with natural materials such as sisal and create a natural and rustic atmosphere. Mason jar decorated with spray snow, looks beautifully wintery with a sisal rope ribbon and a rosemary branch. You can only create great decorations if you wrap rope around the glass.
Cover glass in wool
In the cold season you can make a table decoration that provides warmth and comfort and is easy to make. An old wool sock looks great and the candlelight appears even softer. If you like knitting, you can make this decoration yourself using knitting patterns as you wish.
Make a lantern to hang up
Are you organizing a summer garden party and notice that you don't have any suitable decorations? By hanging several glasses on the tree at different heights, you will attract enthusiastic looks from your guests. Create handles out of some craft wire, decorate them with flowers from the garden, and hang them with colorful organza strips.
Decorate with leftover fabric
You can also make beautiful lanterns yourself from old fabric scraps. Just look around at home, maybe you can find an old cloth that you can cut into strips, stick on the glass and create a unique lantern. This is a great way to creatively reuse unusable things.
Make tea lights out of cans
Of course, effective lanterns cannot only be made from glass. Old tin cans can be quickly and cheaply transformed into great unique pieces with a little imagination. And so that the homemade tea lights bring you nothing but joy, never let the candles burn without supervision or within the reach of children or pets.
Also read:Decorating candle jars: ideas & instructions for autumn
