Craft Tutorial: Paper Towel Embellished Paper Lanterns

I am LOVING the Iron Craft challenges.  They’ve been keeping me busy creating all kinds of things I might not otherwise have thought of!  This week’s challenge was “Be Mine,” and we were to make Valentines.

My husband is not a sentimental guy.  I could have made him a fancy handmade card, but though he would appreciate the effort, he’s not really the type to truly appreciate a card.  He does, however, enjoy when I decorate the house for the holidays.  So for his Valentine, I decided that a decor project would be most appropriate.

A couple of years ago I bought a pair of red paper lanterns at Dollar Tree.  I intended to hang them in my living room, but then I moved to a different house and they no longer matched my decor.  So they got tucked away in a box with all kinds of other odds and ends.  They resurfaced a few weeks ago when I was sorting out a pile of things to donate to Goodwill, and I knew that they would be PERFECT for a Valentine’s Day project!

I decided to decoupage on them.  My initial idea was to tear hearts out of pink mulberry paper and apply them to the lantern, but my local scrapbook store only has a very small selection of materials, and that is one item they unfortunately didn’t have.  Drat!  My next thought was to make the hearts out of tissue paper.  But then, while I was doing a little house cleaning, I had a stroke of genius.  I’ve been very keen on textures lately, and I noticed that my roll of paper towel had an interesting pattern of circles.  And thus were born my paper towel embellished paper lanterns!

Supplies:

• Paper lantern
• Paper towel
• Scissors
• Mod Podge
• Foam brush
• Silver Sharpie

Directions:

Start by cutting heart shapes out of paper towel.  Most paper towel is 2-ply; separate each heart into a pair of hearts.

Open the paper lantern and insert the wire support to make it keep its shape while you work.

Use a foam brush to apply a coat of Mod Podge to the surface of the lantern where you would like the first heart to go.  Place the heart onto the lantern, then apply another layer of Mod Podge over top of the heart.  Brush the Mod Podge on from the center of the heart with outward strokes so that the edges of the heart don’t peel up.

Continue adding hearts until you have covered your lantern.  (I used three large hearts and six small hearts for each lantern, which I cut out of a single sheet of paper towel.)  When the Mod Podge is dry, the hearts will appear very subtly on the lantern.

Use a silver Sharpie marker to trace around the edges of each heart, giving them a little bit more definition.

Now all that remains is to figure out where I’m going to hang them!