Transform a regular mason jar into an adorable animal mason jar lantern! This is a fun and simple craft you can make with your kids, that’ll brighten dark evenings.
Animal Mason Jar Lanterns
You’ll need:
- clean mason jar
- water based white glue / school glue
- paintbrush
- tissue paper or crepe paper
- cardstock in different colors
- scissors
- battery operated tea light
Directions to make an Animal Mason Jar Lantern
Step 1: Start by cutting your tissue paper up into lots of little pieces.
Step 2: Use your paintbrush to paint white glue over one part of the jar and lay tissue paper pieces on. Flatten them and coat them using paintbrush and some more white glue.
Continue adding pieces of tissue paper until you’re happy with it. We were using crepe paper and only applied one layer. If your using tissue paper, you’ll probably need about 2-3 layers.
Step 3: Draw your animal designs onto construction paper and cut them out. For a fox mason jar lantern, we glued the white pieces onto the orange head design, added black eyes and glued ears on top the fox’s head.
We also cut out two matching tail pieces, which we glued together, so the tail design will be visible from the back side of the lantern as well.
Step 4: Use glue to glue the cardboard designs onto the jar.
Step 5: Add your battery operated candle to the jar.
So easy to make! You can also experiment and use different colors of crepe paper / tissue paper and cardstock and make different animal designs!
We made an adorable fox, owl and a little frog!
If you prefer, you can also wrap the neck of the jar in craft wire and then wrap another piece of wire up and over the jar to make a handle.
Safety notice: Lanterns contains glass, wire and possible hazardous small parts (batteries etc..), so make sure to supervise your children appropriately.
Tip: Instead of using tissue or crepe paper to cover the mason jar, if you prefer, you could use acrylic paint and paintbrush and paint the outside of the jar.
How adorable are these! We’ll be using our animal mason jar lanterns for decorating the house and garden for Fall evenings outside and probably Christmas too!
