Christmas Lantern

Watch eyes light up in joy with this Christmas Lantern for Day 4 of the 12 Crafts of Christmas.

A lantern can be used for decorative lighting all year round. From summer candlelights to festive cheer at Christmas. Chances are that you have one or two floating around in your home too. If not, they are easy to find at a great price. Pick one in your desired base color ( I am doing off-white) and have fun dressing it up to match your design style.

You can check out Day 3 Christmas Snow Globe if you missed it.

Christmas Lantern Supplies

Lantern, your choice of size

LED Fairy Lights

Bottle Brush Christmas Tree, and other scene decorations

Decorative Pine Branch Pick

White Paint

1″ Paintbrush

Decorative Craft Balls

Hot Glue

Step 1: Set the Scene

Open up your lantern to set the scene inside. My Ikea lantern had a tealight holder inside. A bottle brush Christmas tree fits perfectly into this spot. To keep it looking simple, that is the only piece of decoration used inside my lantern. But you can do a more elaborate scene if you have room. Perhaps a rocking chair for a cozy indoor scene? Or a snowman along with the tree?

Step 2: Glue In Place

Once you’ve decided on your Christmas scene, take some time and hot glue all of your pieces in place. This way, they don’t move around and fall out when you’re installing the lights later.

Step 3: Place the Lights

You will want to easily access the on/off switch for your lights. The lights for this lantern are from Dollarama and have a small round battery and switch. The battery pack is going to be glued to the top of the lantern later and hidden behind the foliage. To do the same, feed the string of lights through an opening at the top of your lantern.

You are going to need to play around with the lights a lot until you get the look you like. This part took the longest. I wrapped the end of the lights around the tree inside. You can tuck parts of the lights right into the tree too to make it look like the tree is decorated and also to secure the string in place. It’s hard to see but the part of the string closer to the battery pack is wrapped around the lantern ceiling to make the top part really light up as well. This also helped eat up extra string length as the lights were longer for this small of a lantern.

Step 4: Glue on the Battery Pack

Once your lights are all in place, use hot glue to attach the battery pack near the opening that you fed the lights into. Be sure that you can still easily turn the lights on and off.

Step 5: Add Snow To Your Foliage

The snow-covered boughs look so pretty on this lantern. But the evergreen pick was not snow-covered. To get this look, I used white paint. Moving in the direction of the needles, gently wipe small amounts of white paint onto each needle with your paintbrush. Once you’ve covered all the needles, go back and push the pine needles right into your paintbrush bristles to get some white paint down into the middle of each foliage. This will also give a more spotted look to the paint that you just wiped on for a more natural fallen-snow look. Then let it dry.

Step 6: Gather Your Foliage

Now that your pine needles are dry, it’s time to glue them together. Set them together in a way that you like, then use hot glue to attach them together when you like how they look.

Step 7: Add some Sparkle

It’s time to bedazzle (remember those??) your foliage. If you’re following along with all the previous crafts in the 12 Crafts of Christmas then chances are that you have some golden balls leftover from the Stacked Books craft. You can use these to add sparkle to your snowy pine needles.

Step 8: Place The Topper

Now that your foliage accent is complete it’s time to hot glue that baby onto your Christmas lantern. You’ll want to position it so that it’s in front of your battery pack that you glued onto the top of the lantern. This will cover up and hide the battery pack but still lets it be accessible to turn on and off.

Step 9: Make sure it all works

If you haven’t already, turn on your lights and make sure everything lights up and looks great! You can fluff your foliage if needed and reposition your lights until your satisfied with the overall look. Now enjoy your beautiful new light!

Be sure to check out the rest of the crafts in the 12 Crafts of Christmas as we craft our way to the holidays. Let me know in the comments how your lantern turns out!

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