Reading too many home decorating magazines and craft blogs has given me the itch to make festive decorations. But I lost the love for traditional Christmas cheesiness in my late teens, and never really regained it. Still, there was that itch. So I went looking for non Christmassy ideas.

After considering bunting and paper chains and origami, a friend’s suggestion I buy Chinese lanterns roused memories of making paper lanterns at kindergarten. I don’t remember them being specifically for Christmas – and they’d certainly suit other holidays, including Halloween.

They’re very simple (they’d have to be, for kindergarten-age children to make them), and I took some photos so I could make a tutorial-style blog post:

You need paper (I’m recycling knitting pattern print outs here – put the used side inside and you barely see it), sticky tape or glue, coloured celophane, scissors, ruler or paper cutter, sharp-pointed needle and string.

Cut the paper into squares. They don’t have to be exactly square, and they can be any size. I’ve made mine 5cm square. Fold each square in half.

At the folded edge, make cuts about 2/3 to 1/4 the way through. They can be quite close together, or further apart, but it looks best with eight or more cuts along the length of the fold.

Unfold and curl into a tube with the fold running around the middle of the tube. Tape top and bottom. You can use glue, but you’ll have to hold the lantern together with your fingers, paper clip, peg or clip until it’s dry enough to hold together.

Take a scrap of celophane around the same size as the square of paper.

Scrunch it up, roll it between your palms, until it’s small enough to struff down into the lantern. (Don’t scrunch it so much that it falls right out again.)

Thread your needle with string (or yarn, or fine ribbon) and string up the lanterns. You can give each lantern its own string and hang them individually, or put lots of them on the one string. If the string is too fine and slippery you may need to add knots between the lanterns to space them apart.

Or you may want them to crowd together. You could even string them onto a circular wire, and make a wreath of lanterns.

Me – I’m draping strings of lanterns in my lounge room windows, so the sunlight coming inside makes the coloured celophane look like little flames.