Paper Craft Moroccan Lantern

In this Instructable, i make a paper lantern to create an arabic moroccan atmosphere at home :). Also known as bohemian style. The lamp is not easy to make since you need to work like Houdini sometimes but the materials are super cheap :) I made this lamp in a couple of hours, i believe it was 5 hours of work.

For preparation you need to ask a printshop to print out the 3x A2 sized templates on gold metallic cardstock. the paperweight was about 240grams. for the rest you need to check an art&crafts store to find out if they have any translucent paper to use for the windows. In total, it cost me about 4 euro! :) The power cord and bulb holder where already available at home so no extra costs.

Time to cut all the parts out. remove the windows. After the cutting, you can continue with scoring the folding lines so they will be easy to fold in the next step.

Time to fold every folding line! Dash dash lines need to be folded upwards and the dash dot lines need to folded downwards.

cut out squares and rectangles to fit in the windows of your lantern. The best paper would be translucent paper so you won’t block too much light. leave the last or the first of the 8 big windows out, because you will need this access later on. If you use several colours for the paper windows, your lamp will definitely become an eye-catcher! :)

Now it’s time for the difficult part. Start glueing the top and bottom parts which are quite okay to make. I used a precision hot glue gun to save a lot of time. i think it would have worked with a simple glue gun as well but maybe more glue strings to clean up afterwards.

the big base is more difficult to assemble. I connected the 8 sides first and then joined all the tabs from the first half and afterward the other half. I did not glued the small tabs in the middle, so i could keep the lantern open.

glue the top and bottom parts onto half of the base. afterwards, continue by closing the lantern and glue the long tab first. then the tricky part is to glue all the tabs that still need to be glued. This is the real houdini work and difficult not to make a mess hihi.

time to install the cable and bulb holder! Afterwards you can install the little door that gives access to the light source. only install LED or saving bulbs! Paper doesn’t like heat as we all know :-)

the lamp is used was 4 watts LED