Paper Lanterns Decorated Shabby Chic

Hello Lovelies,

Just popping in to share my little fun project recently.
My Beautification series has been on hold for a bit as I have been super busy gardening and took lots of pics for a post but half of them got deleted by gremlins, so will have to take more soon, but that post is on the way. My gardening takes all priority as it is both the source of my peace and my connection with Nature as well as food and flowers. I will pick up back on the Beautification series very shortly.

For now just wanting to share some simple whimsical beauties I just made, paper lanterns.

There are some Chinese ones I adore but cannot find or when I do cannot afford them, but they are gorgeous and I love them. As always a need invents creativity and I bought some plain round white paper lanterns and tried to make something pretty on my own. I did see something a couple years back and took my lesson from them, but with my own twist.

I bought some plain white round paper lanterns at Party City....$7.00 for package of 3.

 




I had some beautiful tissue napkins I wanted to use for decoupage on my plain IKEA Secretary 2 years ago but have not gotten around to it and I'm also loving the simple plain white of it.....for now.
But these floral napkins will be perfect for this project and what I want to see. The beauty of this is that the lanterns come in all colors, and paper napkins come in hundreds of gorgeous different patterns and colors and one can totally personalize what they want to see in their lanterns. The choices are unlimited and I think I'll make more......in the blues, aqua, range.....soft and delicate......ooooooooh.....getting excited again. :D
I used around 3 napkins for two lanterns, and cut out the flowers. There were two extra layers of tissue for each napkin and I removed those which made these super uber thin tissue like but I wanted the sheerness as I did want light to go through it. The cutting was meditative as I listened to something online.
The other materials you will need are Mod Podge, scissors, small paint brush, some nylon or cotton thread to make tassels in colors of your choice or white cotton which you can dye to color of your choice....., and some beads if you want them in the tassel. You can be really creative with tassels.
If you want another color to paint the lantern, you will have to have some of that too, and I wanted Aqua, still one of my favorite colors after white.....and paper towels............... I'll explain how to get through that later on here.......

The white lanterns were easy......simply open them and insert the metal hanger and begin to apply the cut outs of the flowers from the tissue napkins. You mod podge (which I also watered down a bit as it was far too thick for this tissue paper) the back of the cut outs and apply them on the lantern where you want them....then you mod podge the surface making sure to get all the edges of the cut out firmly down so it is all flush onto the lantern. It looks beautiful already. I love simple but dramatic projects.

For the Aqua one, I thought I could just mix up some Aqua paint from the colors I had, and that was a bit of work as my blues and greens were all the wrong ones, but I finally got it right. Applying the paint straight onto the lantern made it too opaque for my taste and didn't allow for much light to go through so I had to act fast and use a wet paper towel to remove what I had applied.....then I added water to the paint for a watery consistency and used a wet paper towel dipped into it and lightly squeezed to give the rest of the lantern a light and quick wash. You don't want this to get too wet as it is paper. I was lucky as I acted fast lolol, so I quickly washed the rest of the lantern with the watery Aqua "wash" using the dipped paper towel, then brought it outside to dry in the sun which it did rather quickly too. The lantern has an uneven quality to it which I love and adds to its interest. These things are very forgiving, you can make mistakes which turn out to be their very beauty.

Then I had to make some tassels and used some beads I already had to add some weight to it. Now for me, I wanted the tassels to be like the ones the Chinese use as they drape, move and hang very nicely, every strand separate from each other but I could not find the nylon thread to do this. I found one large roll in white but nylon cannot be dyed as I wanted to match the Aqua lantern with an Aqua tassel, so I opted for cotton thread. I knew I could dye these, so I will have to sacrifice the nice drapi-ness of the nylon for proper color which I think is wise. I have a pail of aqua dye lying in a bucket as I dyed a blouse last week and am doing what little bits I can because I love this color. So the dye was lying there ready to dye the cotton tassels which only needed to be dipped for 2 seconds for the right color.
Making tassels is very easy and you can find lots of youtubes on line for this, and today I finished them. As I look at them I see one must be careful of the shape of the cutout, no sharp sides is best.
I made three as three come in a package. They are hanging on the front porch, safe from rain. I like them. :D

 This lantern has different flowers of tulips, I love both.

This was a fun, cheap and easy, beautiful and quick project. I hope you try it and I'd love to see what you do!
Thanks for visiting.

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