How to Make a Mushroom Lantern
Brighten your day with these charming upcycled mushroom lanterns! This fun and easy craft is perfect for beginners, and is a delightful project for both kids and adults.
Yield: 1 upcycled mushroom lantern
Cost: $3
Equipment
- Assorted round objects (to trace around)
Materials
- Yogurt or drink bottle (white; clean and empty)
- Battery operated tealight candle
- Craft foam sheets (red and white)
- Green felt
Instructions
Step 1: Find what you need
- Gather your supplies and materials.
Step 2: Add the light to the stem
- Wash a drink bottle and remove the label. A protein shake or yogurt drink bottle is ideal. We used a 375 ml Boost protein shake bottle.
- Place a battery-operated tealight candle on the center bottom of the bottle. Trace around it with a permanent marker.
- Have an adult use a craft knife to cut just inside the circle. Try to make it so the tealight will sit tightly in the opening, rather than falling through.
- Place the flameless tealight into the opening. Optional: Add a couple dots of glue to keep it in place, if needed.
Step 3: Create the mushroom cap
- Place an 8 inch plate upside-down on a sheet of red craft foam. Trace around it with a pencil, pen, or anything that will leave an indent in the foam. (You can even use your fingernail!)
- Cut the foam circle. Fold it in half twice to mark the center point.
- Unfold and cut along one fold line up to the center point.
- Here's what the circle should look like.
- Trace around various objects like coins, buttons, and marker caps to create a variety of circle sizes on the white craft foam. Cut the circles from the foam.
- Attach the white circles to the red circle. We used adhesive foam, but you can also use glue on regular foam. Be sure to leave a blank area on the circle that's a bit less than 1/4 of the surface.
- With your glue gun on a low temperature setting, add a line of hot glue to the blank section and fold the other part of the circle over. This creates the mushroom cap. Hold the foam in place until the glue dries.
Step 4: Add grass to the base
- Cut a piece of felt to be about 3 inches tall and 8-1/2 inches long (long enough to fit around your bottle). Fold the felt in half and cut a "V" shaped fringe going down about 3/4 of the way.
- Add a zig zag line of hot glue along the bottom edge of the bottle.
- Press the felt grass into the glue, lining up the flat bottom with the bottom edge of the bottle. Continue gluing around the bottle. Cut any excess felt, if necessary.
Step 5: Add the mushroom cap
- Add a circle of glue around the bottle cap. Press the center of the mushroom cap into the glue.
- Your upcycled mushroom lantern is complete!
- Create your own little garden of mushroom lanterns.
- And turn on the tealights to watch your upcycled mushroom lanterns glow!
Video
Notes
Looking for more tealight crafts? Here's a few of our favourites:
DIY Flower Tealight
Paper Roll Candles
DIY Clay House