Flickering Paper Lanterns on a Stick

On Thursday evening, my friend Maria and I took the girls to see the Lantern Festival at Missouri Botanical Garden.  It was absolutely breathtaking!  If you ever visit St. Louis in the summer, I highly recommend a visit to this annual exhibition.

Photo by Jade Dong, courtesy of Missouri Botanical Garden

Photo by Brian Mueller, courtesy of Missouri Botanical Garden

Photo by Brian Mueller, courtesy of Missouri Botanical Garden

In the gift shop, the girls spotted some plastic battery operated lanterns hanging on sticks.  They begged, and against my better judgement, I bought one for each of them.  I am wincing as I type this, they were $12 a piece.  But, the girls looked so cute carrying them through the garden and lots of passers-by commented about how adorable they were with their lanterns.

On the way home, Miss Imp plucked all of the strings out of her lantern's tassel.  As of today, one lantern is completely dead and the other is barely hanging on. Yes, I should have known better. 

If I had a do-over, I would make and bring these paper lanterns to the festival. I started with the basic paper lantern that everyone learns in grade school.  To make it sturdy, I used a leftover shirt box. 

To light up my lanterns, I glued battery operated tea-lights to pieces of twill tape and suspended them inside.  After gluing in additional pieces of the shirt box for support, I added grommets and a wire handle.

I used pieces of wood dowel for the sticks.   To join the stick to the lantern, I screwed a tiny eye-hook in the top of the dowel and attached a light weight split key ring.

Here are the lanterns lit up. With the flickering tea-lights, it almost looks like there are real candles inside.

The girls are ready for next summer's lantern festival!