Lantern Crafts for Chinese New Year

With CNY preparations in full swing this week, today's post is going to focus on a bunch of different crafting ideas for creating Chinese lanterns. Last year, my adoptive blogging friend Cindy featured these fantastic Chinese New Year Lanterns out of red envelopes.

You can find detailed instructions here on her blog.

You can find red envelopes at Party City and Pier 1 right now. If you want to keep it simple, I've posted instructions for creating construction paper lanterns here on my blog. Josie has even been able to help me with this craft the last three years.

Instructions for making paper lanterns out of Styrofoam cups found here on Family Corner.

Another favorite lantern that we've made the last few years, is this glass lantern made of recycled glass jars, red tissue paper, stickers and other embellishments.

This craft was featured on my blog here and each year we've added another one to our growing collection.



A favorite blog that I've mentioned before (Let's go fly a Kite) posted this beautiful idea for creating lanterns out of thumb prints. Simply fabulous!!

She even sent us a Chinese newspaper (along with a colorful dragon and special Chinese envelopes) so that we could make our own artwork.

As you can imagine, Josie was eager to test out all her various paint colors on this project.

Based on advice from Let's go fly a Kite I used a sharpie marker to draw the lantern string/fringe.

I had so much fun with this craft, I even decorated a set of plain red greeting cards (found in the Target $1 bin) to make special CNY stationary.

Happy Crafting!

Happy soon-to-be Chinese New Year!