2dBride's paper lanterns with Westinghouse Stick N Click Lightbulbs

Materials:

• Twenty-seven eighteen inch natural dragon cloud irregular ribbing lanterns, from AsianIdeas.com



• Twenty-seven Westinghouse stick up light bulbs from Amazon seller A Hidden Deal.  The "bulb" is actually plastic, and is a krypton bulb, so it remains cool to the touch, but doesn't have the blue tinge of LED lights.  The down side is that it tends to last for only a few hours before the battery needs to be changed, rather than the 100 hours or so that an LED light will last.
• 108 AA batteries from Dollar Tree.
• Monofilament line.  We ordered 1,000 yards of 20-lb. test monofilament from Cabellas, which we used for all our lanterns.

Instructions

With the 18" lanterns, I found that the LED "throwies" used in smaller lanterns produced an excessively dim and blue light.  I therefore looked for another solution that would not require pluging each light into an electrical socket.

As shown above, the stick-up bulb comes with a base that is intended to be stuck to the wall, plus the light fixture itself.  The base has two slots intended to secure the light from screws in the wall.  These slots are in a U-shaped piece of plastic, which has a tab on the bottom.  I put monofilament around the tab at the end of the U-shaped piece, and more monofilament through the two slots.  I then tied it in such a way as to cause the base to be as level as possible, and put it over the bottom of the C ring on the wire of the paper lantern.  I then slipped the bulb into the base.  This could be done way ahead of time, as the bulb has a pull cord that turns it off and on.

The lanterns lit with the Stick N Click bulbs are the largest ones in the photo at the top of this article.  As you can see, the Stick N Click bulbs produced a relatively bright glow.  The batteries lasted for about five or six hours before running down, which is less than the LED throwies, but much more than the battery-operated paper lanterns you can buy in stores.

Cost

The cost of 27 of the 18" lanterns plus lighting was $190.33, calculated as follows:

• Twenty-seven 18" lanterns $102.60
• Twenty-seven stick-up bulbs at $2.99 each
• Twenty-seven packs of 4 AA batteries from Dollar Tree at $1 each

Yeah, it really depends on how big the lanterns are.  For our 10" lanterns, the LEDs worked just fine.  But for these 18", the light was a bit dim and blue for my taste with the LEDs.  We are, however, saving some of the bulbs for our dark closets after the wedding!

Excellent idea - they look great! I wish we saw this before  ur wedding! We used LED throwies, and definitely felt they barely glowed for the effort, and even though they were diffused, the glow was still very "spotty"