Chinese lantern garland

Now the Christmas decorations are down we wanted to make some new pieces of art to hang around the house. With Chinese New Year around the corner we thought Chinese lanterns would be fun and made a sweet little garland of lanterns to hang in the window.

Materials needed to make a Chinese lantern garland:
cellophane
black card
scissors
contact paper
ribbon to string them together
sellotape

How to make a Chinese lantern garland:

Draw and cut out a small Chinese lantern shape. This is quite fiddily so you may want to do this in advance – rather than with your 3 year old sitting next to you telling you to hurry up!

Set up an invitation to play with the lantern cut outs, cellophane pieces and contact paper.

I cut a strip of contact paper and placed each lantern cut out on top. Then my 3 year old had fun with the cellophane pieces, choosing her favourite colours and placing each one over the cut out. If you wanted you could cut the pieces of cellophane into smaller pieces but we chose to have one larger piece for each lantern.

When she had finished we placed another strip of contact paper over the top and I cut around each lantern. We then taped each lantern to a piece of ribbon and hung it up in the window.