Home Care in Greenwood, IN

Enjoying crafts together is a fantastic way for your aging loved ones to bond with their home care providers and enjoy a stronger relationship while also stimulating their minds. This craft is fantastic for the Halloween season to add some creepy fun to your parents’ décor, but you can also use the same technique to create decorative lanterns for winter holidays or events throughout the year. Following the steps of this craft stimulates your parents’ cognitive processing skills, critical thinking skills, and memory skills, and changing up the look for each lantern encourages your parents to express themselves and show off their own creativity and imagination.

What You’ll Need:

• Mason jars in your desired size. Quart size work best, but you can also use smaller jars if you desire
• Acrylic paint
• Self-adhesive paper or vinyl
• Paintbrushes
• Outdoor quality Modge Podge
• Twine
• Battery-operated tea lights
• Craft knife
• Pencil
• Stencils
• Paper plates
• Plastic tablecloth or newspapers

What to Do

• Make sure that the jars are clean and dry before getting started. This ensures that the vinyl and the paint stick properly to the glass

• Line your work area with the plastic tablecloth or newspapers to keep the mess under control

• Place the paper plates out in the middle of the table or at each place so that each person doing the project can reach all of the colors that they want easily

• Squeeze out the acrylic paint onto the paper plates. You can use whatever colors you want, but for Halloween-themed lanterns, black, purple, green, and orange are effective

• Use the pencil to sketch out the shape that you want to create on the lantern on the back of the adhesive paper or vinyl. This shape is what will not be covered with tape and where the light will shine through to create the lantern effect. You can freehand shapes or use stencils to create your pattern

• Use the craft knife to cut out the shapes

• Adhere the vinyl or paper on the side of the glass jar in the position that you want. Make sure that the edges are smoothed down to the glass so that the paint does not go under the vinyl or paper

• Coat the bottom of the jars with acrylic paint and allow the dry

• Use the paintbrushes to coat the entire outside of the jar

• Paint over the vinyl or adhesive paper to create sharp edges for your design

• Allow the paint to dry for a few seconds and then carefully peel the vinyl or adhesive paper off of the jar to reveal the design

• Allow the paint to dry completely

• Coat the jar with outdoor quality Modge Podge and allow to dry completely

• Tie a length of twine on either side of the ring portion of the top of the jar

• When the jar is dry, put a battery-operated tea light inside the jar

• Place the lid of the jar on top

• Screw the ring part of the way onto the jar and hold it up by the two lengths of twine to balance the jar and find where you should join them

• Tie the lengths of twine together to create a handle to hang your lantern.