Dress up a Lantern for Summertime

5 Materials
$30
45 Minutes
Medium

Summer is upon us, so it is time to decorate a lantern for my front porch! If you would like to dress up a lantern for summer fun, follow along! You can see more of my crafts here!

A decorative lantern is a great item to have on hand and style throughout the year. Today I will show you how I turned this into a delightful way to welcome guests to my home this summer. 

Use a scrap piece of styrofoam like I did, or cut one approximately, 2″x 3″ x 4″. Wrap the foam with a piece of craft chicken wire. Doing this will allow you to use wire or pipe cleaners to attach the foam to the top of your lantern without the wire cutting through the styrofoam. 

Twist two pieces of pipe cleaner together for extra length, thread it through the chicken wire as shown above. You can use the loose ends of the pipe cleaners to attach the little cage to your lantern. Each lantern will be different, but these basics should help you get started with your own. 

Using long lengths of green pipe cleaner, secure your little cage of of foam to the top of your lantern. If you are shopping for a lantern you know you will want to decorate, think about how you will attach something to it.

Watermelon is such a summer thing, when I spotted this at Dollar Tree, I knew I could use it! The sign came with a string on it, but I cut it off.  You can attach a length of two or three pipe cleaners connected together, secure them onto the sign and then attach it to your lantern like you did your little cage.  

Faux flowers with stiff stems are perfect because you can stick them right into the foam. If you have finer stems you may need to use wood wired sticks. 

If you make a lot of floral crafts you might want to add a steel pick machine to your equipment. The machine puts a steel pick onto your florals like the one shown in the yellow circle above. 

This photo shows how the cage is attached with the florals being added to the lantern.

I began with a variety of white faux florals. Primarily white daisies and white wisteria were used to fill out the arrangement to begin with.  

Lime green daisies from Dollar Tree are a great way to pick up the colors from the rind on the watermelon sign.  

Adding red carnations to pick up on the red of the watermelon sign is the perfect pop of color and completes the look!

My lantern is all ready to display!  I would love to have you stop by my blog , Celebrate & Decorate for the full tutorial as well as sign up for my latest creations, posts, recipes, exclusives, and more...

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Chloe Crabtree
Want more details about this and other DIY projects? Check out my blog post!
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  1 question
  • Sarah Sarah on Jun 28, 2022

    How safe is it to light the candles?

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