How to Make a Castle Lantern

Supplies:
Hot Glue Gun and lots of glue
Regular Elmers Glue
Popsicle Sticks
Pistachio Shells
Old Magazine
Pony Beads
Wooden Beads
Tooth Picks
Craft Paint
Ruler
Scissors
Cardboard from a small boom box package
Masking Tape
Egg Carton
Printer

Most of these supplies are recycled materials and should be easy to come by or you could ask a friend for if they use items you don't. This is a fun project and even a child should be able to get involved in making this.

Start off by cutting holes in the tops of your lifted edges of your cardboard from the small boom box package like in video. Then add the egg carton bottoms cut individually to the tops of the cut holes by hot gluing them on. Then masking tape the whole top.

 Next step, hot glue 2 popsicle sticks together to create a corner. Do this 4 total times. Then hot glue them into your corners. After that hot glue in your other popsicle sticks to create breaks along the long sides of the cardboard. The hot glue popsicles sticks at the base all the way around to create a standing building, as shown in video.

After that you move to prepping your shingle areas on your roof. So take pages out of your old magazine and fold them in half 4 times. Use your ruler to measure an inch down marking your inch zones. Now cut a straight line on your first inch zone then cut a triangle on the other side. Repeat this step and to keep your triangles even use your first cut out as a guide. You will need enough to cover the roof area. When gluing these on you use elmers glue, making sure to stagger your triangles. Start from the bottom and work to the top.

After this you want to hot glue on your pistachio shells to the popsicle sticks to create a stone looking texture. Once this is done then go in and fill the space between them in with hot glue like mortar.Also hot glue on the shells from bottom to top of the egg carton domes.

Now you want to take your tooth picks and shove them into the tops of the egg carton areas. Then put a wooden bead down first, then a pony bead hot gluing them down. The on the top edges of the roof hot glue pony beads around the edge.

Wow that was some work right, but now as weird as this things looks so far, lets bring it to life with some paint. So you want a white canvas base so either spray paint or just paint the entire things white. OMG the castle appears and looks neat then.

Now you want to paint the pistachio shells grey or silver at the base like stone. The roof what ever color you want, and the pistachio shell domes gold as well as the beads. Adding fun glow in the dark accents, sponge on glow in the dark green around the base, glow in the dark orange at the tips of the roof triangles, and glow in the dark yellow on the edges of the domes.

After this print up the images below to add to your castle so that when the light shines through it will give you a beautiful image. Don't forget you will need the mirror image of the images. 2 of the couple, 2 of the dragon, and 4 of the knight and horse. After printing and cutting them to size glue them in with elmers glue.

To add an extra touch poke holes in the roof to create light spots when lit up on the ceiling in a nice pattern.

Your Done!!! Add your lights and watch the beautiful fun!!!

 

Note when figuring out the size to print your images measure the space to see the closest size to choose.