DIY Yarn Lanterns

It’s Wedding Week and around here and we are celebrating three years with our usual pomp and circumstance and wedding- themed posts! True to form, our wedding was filled with a bunch of DIY details that really made it special and unique to us. In past years, I showed you how I asked the girls to be my bridesmaids, how we DIYed our wedding programs, and today I wanted to show you a simple how-to that really added to the decoration in our reception venue.

Our reception was held at Elk Manor Winery in Northeast, MD and we had the party itself in a big white tent… essentially one big, blank canvas with which to create whatever look we wanted. You can see a lot of the decorations and details in this post, but one of the things I’ve never really blogged about was what we did to the ceiling space. We kept it simple, adding white twinkle lights around the perimeter of the tent, but for the space between the vaulting poles, we chose to add some dreamy DIY lanterns made of yarn.

The how-to for these guys is really easy and only takes a few supplies. You’ll need some big, round balloons (we used the punching balloons… you know, the ones that come with a rubber band attached and you can punch them in and out from your fist… they sell them at the Dollar Store), A LOT of yarn, some glue, flour and water. Unfortunately, I don’t have too many pictures of the process because these were the pre-blogging days when not every project warranted step by step documentation. 🙂

BUT, I do have some… The basic gist is that you mix equal parts glue, water, and flour together to make the adhesive. Blow up the balloon to your desired size and then dip the yarn into the adhesive and start wrapping. Here’s my cousin, Megan, who came over for the day to help us get them all finished… she’ll show you how it’s done. 🙂

From there, wrap, wrap, wrap until the balloon is as covered as you want it!

After we wrapped them, we stuck them on various bowls so they could dry and firm up. At one point, we tried to hang them, but found that hanging them while they were still wet led to droopy looking shapes instead of nice, even orbs.

Here’s what they looked like all dry and ready for hanging!

We used fishing line to hang them in the tent, which gave the illusion that they were floating in mid-air… so pretty and dreamy! In the end, it was such a fun addition to the room and we loved how it all turned out.