Recycle glass jars to make cute indoor or outdoor lanterns
Decorating the home and garden with lanterns is always a good idea - you can bring light into dark corners and make your home look more beautiful and feel more welcoming.
Lanterns can easily be made by recycling glass jars using DIY projects. You only need a few materials - most recycled - to create wonderful lanterns for use around your home.
Making lanterns from glass jars will be easy and fun and you can also involve your children in these fantastic projects. Below, we suggest 10 of these projects:
1. Moss lanterns
To decorate the dining table or a coffee table with a touch of nature, make some pretty moss lanterns. Making these is very simple: just take some empty glass vases, fill them with moss and place strings of battery-operated fairy lights inside them. By themselves or grouped together, they will make for a wonderful decoration.
2. Outdoor, hanging lanterns
Make some hanging jar lanterns to illuminate your driveway: insert battery-operated lights inside the glass jars and make a handle to carry them with (or hang them up with) from wire. You can also make the hanging brackets using scrap pieces of wood (in any size you prefer).
3. Indoor, hanging lantern
Hanging jar lanterns are also perfect for illuminating the indoors, bringing light to any dark corners; make a wooden or metal bracket and hang up your jar lantern (which has the bulb secured to the lid).
4. Tissue paper lanterns
Tutorial via masonjarofmemories.com
The kids will have a lot of fun making jar lanterns decorated with tissue paper. Cut or tear up small pieces of colored tissue paper and glue these to the glass jar using decoupage glue. Insert a battery-operated candle into the jar and make a decorative carry-handle using string and beads.
5. Oil lanterns
Tutorial via apieceofrainbow.com
Simple to make and beautiful to look at, oil lanterns are safer than candles, burn for ages and will add a romantic feel to your rooms. To make these, you will need glass jars, vegetable oil, a floating wick, water and natural decorative materials (such as fruit, flowers, leaves, pebbles, pine cones or small twigs). Start by filling the jar with the decorative materials and water, add a surface layer of oil and the floating wick and your lantern is ready.
6. Lanterns with dried flowers
Tutorial via happyhooligans.ca
Paint your glass jars however you want and decorate them with dried flowers and leaves to make lovely, decorative lanterns.
7. Rustic lanterns
Tutorial via mountainofmodernlife.com
Decorate your walls with rustic-looking lanterns; to make these, you will need short wooden planks, glass jars, copper foil, gold leaf, wall brackets, battery-operated candles and pebbles for decoration. Sand and stain/paint the wood planks, glue the gold leaf and copper sheets to the base of the planks, attach the bracket and hang up the jars which contain the pebbles and candles.
8. Fairy lanterns
Tutorial via adventure-in-a-box.com
Make your children's nights magical with fairy lanterns. To make these, you need glass jars, spray paint, black paper, printed-out drawings (fairytale-themed, of course) to serve as templates, adhesive tape and white PVA glue. Start by painting the outside of the jars with spray paint, cut out the drawings from the black paper (using the templates as guides) then glue them to the insides of a jar. Insert a battery-operated candle and the lanterns will be ready for your kid's room.
9. Winter glitter lantern
@daydreaming_butterfly/Instagram
To brighten up your winter, make a cute, glitter-snowman lantern. All you need to do is cover your jar with white glitter, then paint on a snowman's face (or glue a picture of one onto it). Insert a candle or a string of battery-operated lights and your winter lantern will be ready to use.
10. Rustic garden lanterns
Make rustic-styled lanterns for the porch or veranda. Simply fill your glass jars with decorative pebbles, insert a candle and make a carry-handle with string. Hang these lanterns up in the gazebo, on the porch or your veranda.
Which of these projects will you try first?