Lovely Lanterns

My Mother-in law had bought some glass vases from the charity shop and wanted to transform them into lanterns to sell at a WI fundraising event.  She then realised that she had no equipment to decorate them with so asked me if I would mind doing it instead.  Of course I didn’t!

Two of the lanterns were straight-sided and I’d seen some YouTube demos showing how you could glue the top layer of patterned napkins onto glass.  I wanted to make my own panels so started by cutting white tissue paper to fit and sprayed it with Distress Spray Stains.

Once dry, I stamped a variety of silhouette stamps from Lavinia across each piece.

Next, using Ranger Multi Medium Matte, I attached each piece of tissue to the vase.  This was rather more difficult than it looked with napkins, maybe because the tissue paper is so delicate.

I ended up with a couple of holes and wrinkled areas but there was little more I could do whilst they were wet so they were set aside to dry.

Once dry, I wasn’t happy with the finish so I looked through my stash of dies to see what I could use to disguise the holes.  For the botanical one, I selected some foliage and flower dies and finished the bottom edge with a grass die from Lawn Fawn.

I discovered some silver birch tree trunk dies (that I’ve had for years but don’t think I’ve ever used) and they were perfect for the foxes in the forest.  I added another layer of Multi Medium over the top of the die-cuts to secure them.

The final vase was a lovely shape but not one that lent itself to having large pieces of anything stuck onto it.  I wanted to add some dragonflies from Visible Image’s Brighter Days and thought I’d use the Wildflowers stencil but again was thwarted by the shape of the vase.  For the dragonflies, I taped a piece of 200g vellum to the bottom of my spray box and spritzed with Distress Spray Stains in Picked Raspberry, Mustard Seed and Salty Ocean and left it to dry.  Taping the vellum down stopped it from rolling up and smearing all the inky spray before it dried.

Using the Wildflowers stencil for inspiration, I used a black Posca pen and sketched grasses and flowers around the bottom of the vase.  After stamping the dragonflies on the vellum, I fussy cut them and attached them to the vase, adhering only the body.  A black gem was added for the head and the bodies were given dimension by applying Ebony Black Nuvo Crystal Drops thickly along each body.

Each lantern was simply lit with a string of battery fairy lights.