Halloween is a special season for Makers! Costumes, decorations, these are all Maker things that make the witchiest night of the year special for people who love to create things with their hands and crafts skills.

Today, we'll show you how to spook up the night with a mason jar, a few napkins and a handful of LEDs - turning this unlikely friends into a Halloween lantern with a spooky face!

Let's get started!

Supplies

For this crafts project, we will need the following:

A mason jar
A few napkins
A few stencils
A bottle of white glue or school glue

We will also need the following tools!

A crafts brush - a simple foam brush will do the job
A crafts blade or scissors
Some adhesive tape
A black sharpie

Step 1: Need Video or Print Instructions?

If you would like a video to guide you through this project, we've got you covered! You can find our video instructions right here.

And if you would like to print out these instructions in English or Spanish, no problem! Click on the PDF files we attached to this step to download them for later.

Step 2: Shredding Your Napkins Into Strips

For this step, we'll work with your paper napkins!

Grab one and gently separate its plies apart - it's easiest to start from one corner and work your way towards the center, then move to another corner. Do the same with at least another napkin for a total of at least four plies.

Next, grab one of your paper plies and tear it into wide strips by hand, as straight as possible (it doesn't have to be perfect). Do the same for all of your napkin plies, until you have a big fluffy pile of napkin paper strips!

Step 3: Gluing Your Napkin Strips

Now let's decorate your jar with the strips, with the power of white glue! For this step, we'll need your Mason jar, your brush, your bottle of white glue and your napkin strips.

Squeeze some white glue on your brush. Then, hold your jar by the mouth so you don't put glue all over your fingers and start dabbing glue on your jar! Working from the bottom to the top, cover a section as wide as your paintbrushand make sure to get glue between the grooves for the lid of the jar as well. Work at your own pace - all we're looking for is a nice, uniform layer of tacky glue on your jar for the napkin strips to stick to!

Once we have a nice section of glue on the jar, grab a napkin strip and stretch it gently across the sticky surface. The strips are a little fragile, so work slowly and gently so that they don't tear! Once you get to the mouth of the jar, use your fingers to gently tap the napkin between the grooves for the lid of the jar as well.

Grab another napkin strip to cover the rest of that glue section, then dab more glue to cover the next section of your jar, and keep adding napkin strips one section at a time until the jar is completely covered in napkin strips. Remember to work at your own pace and take your time!

Next we can add strips to cover the bottom and the mouth of the jar - congratulations! If you like, you can also add a few strips of paper to the bottom and the mouth of your jar for a smooth finish, but it's completely optional.

With a good paper foundation in place, we're already halfway through this project! Now let's stencil a spooky face on your lantern...

Step 4: Cutting Out Your Stencil

We have attached a few stencil designs to this step for you to download and print on cardstock, but you can also just grab a sheet of cardstock and draw your own stencils! You will also need your crafts blade or a pair of scissors and some adhesive tape.

Let's start with the mouth of the stencil you picked: cut a zig zag from the outside in, then cut out the grey area inside the mouth. Once you're done, line up the zig zag edges with each other and tape them back together!

Easy enough, right? Do the same thing - zigzag cut, then cutting out the grey area and taping back - for the eyes and other features of the stencil you picked.

Don't throw away your cardstock after cutting off the stencil! We'll need it for later...

Halloween lantern - stencils.pdf
Download

Step 5: Stenciling Your Jar

For this step, we will need the stencil you just prepared, a couple of rubber bands, your bottle of acrylic paint and your brush.

Grab the stencil and place it on your jar, holding it in place with a couple of rubber bands. Make sure the stencil is squeezed against the jar as tight as possible for a clean stencil transfer! We want as little paint as possible to leak between the stencil and the jar.

Squeeze some paint on a piece of your brush then dab away at the stencil, insisting on the parts you cut out: the paint will transfer to the exposed face of the jar, and the cardstock will protect the rest of the jar from the paint!

Add as much paint as you need to cover all the exposed parts of the jar. You can also add another layer of paint - just give the first layer a little time to dry! Once you're done, carefully take the rubber bands and the stencil off the jar (watch out for paint stains!) and let the whole lantern finish drying.

Step 6: Touching Up Your Lantern's Face

Here's the catch with stencils: sometimes they do too good a job and protect the surface even when they are not supposed to! Which means your lantern's face might not look perfect. Or, maybe there's a little paint where it shouldn't be. That's where your black marker comes in!

Gently fill in the gaps in paint with your marker, and draw clean lines where they are needed if you want. Be careful not to tear at the napkin layer with your marker - work with gentle strokes across the face of your lantern!

Step 7: Lighting Up Your Lantern

Remember the stencils printout from earlier? Check it again - there's a cardstock strip for you to cut there! We will also need your LEDs, coin cell batteries and some adhesive tape to light up the face of your lantern.

Let's start by testing your LEDs! Slide them on your coin cell batteries - long leg on the positive side, short leg on the negative side: your LEDs should light up right away.

Did your LEDs all light up? Perfect! Tape the LEDs and the batteries to the cardstock strip, making sure they line up with the face of your lantern as much as possible. We also want to make sure the dotted line on your cardstock strip kinda lines up with the mouth of your jar!

Bend that dotted line, and tape the cardstock strip to the bottom of your jar lid. Finally, drop the LEDs into the jar and line them up to face the front of the lantern and see how it looks! Move and retape the LEDs around if you need to - just remember LEDs give the most light in front of them, so make sure they point towards the lantern's face as much as possible!

Step 8: All Done!

Congratulations, you're all done! Your lantern might not look like much in the daytime, but at night it'll certainly turn the Spookiness Meter up to 11!

What's next? Well...How about trying other napkin colors? Green for zombies of Frankenstein's monster, white for ghosts and mummies, and you can always try different faces on your lantern too!

Snap a picture and share your creations with us on Instagram with the hashtag #jocomakes! - we always love to see what you come up with. Happy Halloween!