Paper Craft – Make a Butterfly Lantern

Make a beautiful Butterfly Lantern to decorate your room or workspace with just the humblest of craft materials – paper! It’s a fun project that both kids and adults will enjoy making.

Used floral or patterned scrapbook paper to personalise the design to match your home decor.

Have you ever visited a butterfly house? It’s a delightful experience full of fleeting moments of joy. The purest of those is when a butterfly chooses to land on a child’s head.

It’s tempting to want to take a photo, but in the few seconds you fluff around with the camera, the butterfly has moved onward. The moment has passed. Some things, I suppose are only meant to be captured as memories.

Today I have for you a paper lantern project that celebrates the beauty of butterflies. Unless you have lepidopterophobia (the fear of butterflies), I think you will agree, this butterfly craft is something very pretty to make.

Pair it with an LED candle and you have a lovely gift for Mother’s Day or a Teacher’s Gift. It would also look very pretty as part of a table centerpiece at your next party or special dinner.

Just remember no real candles – fire and paper don’t play nice.

You may also like to make this Paper Butterfly Garland

How to Make a Butterfly Paper Lantern

You will need:

• 4 pieces of A4 paper (four different colours of your choice)
• Foil scrap
• Pencil
• Paper scissors
• Sticky tape
• Glue
• Art knife
• Art cutting board
• Ruler
• Small torch, LED lights or LED candle

Note:

To give this paper butterfly lantern a little more decorative sparkle, you could try making the butterfly pieces with ornamental paper. Or, perhaps use glitter glue on the lantern walls and butterflies.

How to:

1/ Print template at 100% on three different pieces of colour paper, and cut out the paper butterfly pieces.

2/ To start with, decide which A4 sheet is going to be the lantern base. Take this piece of paper and fold it inward, at a measure of 7.5cm, then repeat twice.

3/ Open out this sheet, and then fold the top and bottom edge 1.5cm inward.

4/ Place the folded sheet on the cutting board. Using an art knife, cut out half-butterfly outlines randomly throughout the sheet. See the template reference marker for the half-butterfly. Fold the half-butterfly cuttings, outward.

5/ Refold the A4 sheet along the three fold lines created in step 2. Tape the ends of this paper together, creating a lantern base.

6/ Take the foil scrap and fold it down into a 7.5cm square flat sheet. Tape this square foil piece to the top of the paper lantern base.

7/ Fold he butterfly wings that you cut out in step 1, and glue the body sections to the sides of the paper lantern, in random spots.

8/ Place the butterfly lantern over a battery operated light. Voila! You have yourself a gorgeous paper butterfly lantern that casts pretty shadows around the room.