This Saturday was the
Public Dreams organized Illuminares lantern festival. I've been before and found all the lanterns fascinating so this year we made our own. I looked online to find info about making lanterns and I didn't find much so this blog post will be details of how we constructed them.
First off was the bamboo. We made our shapes using bamboo and hung the lanterns from bamboo sticks. The sticks were easy enough but to find the really fine stuff to make the lantern I bought a bamboo blind. It was just over $10 and supplied enough bamboo for many many lanterns. I also bought lots of colours of tissue paper from the dollar store. We also used white glue, masking tape, string and a light but more on that later. The sticks for making the lantern was the challenging part and the blind parts were great because they could be easily bent into the forms. I would recommend making a really good lantern skeleton because it will give the tissue paper the best form (and will be easier to attach tissue paper to). We stuck the bamboo together with masking tape which worked fantastic. Sometimes clothespegs were useful to hold joints together before the masking tape. Donna also used string to pull her design into a better shape.
Donna's Teacup - midconstruction.
A look inside the mushroom.
After making the bamboo skeleton we attached tissue paper using white glue. I would suggest to use dark rich colours and maybe even double layer because with the light it all turns pretty pale. Light pink doesn't look much different from white. Donna hung her lantern while working on it which seemed to work really well.
For lights we used LED bicycle lights which most people seemed to own (from
MEC). I would recommend firmly attaching the light inside the construction before the addition of tissue paper but remember you need to be able to reach inside and turn it on later. One bicycle light was sufficient but you could also put in several tea lights. We saw many constructions with tealights (and other years friends saw lanterns consumed with flames before even entering the park). I've seen tea-lights placed inside metal dishes (like the disposable kind used for mini-quiches or something) I'm guessing so the wax doesn't spill all over.
Inside a big lantern showing the tealights.
Sarah decorating the carrot.
The sad pumpkin.
Finally (or firstly) the designs. The best ones that night (in my humble opinion of course) were the weird ones. In our group we had a steaming teacup, mushroom (we saw several that night - I carried the mushroom and was approached by people who wouldn't believe that no I didn't have shrooms to sell them), bird, carrot, pumpkin (Matt's 30 min construction miracle that looked better in the dark ^_^) and a box lantern by Emily. Other lanterns we saw (for future inspiration): slice of toast, watermelon slice, airplane, vishnu, elephant, polar bear, lots of fish variants, pegasus, eggplant and a fantastic insect. If people remember other ideas please post them in the comments!
We also saw lots of neat displays where people set up a static lantern display rather than carrying them around. There was a great undersea setup with a yellow submarine, a bicycle, a farm scene with eggs with legs running around and lots of other random collections.
All in all, our lantern construction took several hours and adding the tissue paper took the longest. We had a fun afternoon making stuff and then a BBQ before heading out for the night. And we have enough stuff to make lanterns again next year.
