At home and garden stores, or at hardware stores, you can find solar lights in a variety of colors and material housing, from glass to squishy plastic.

This Instructable shows you how to make a small glowing sphere powered by the sun out of stuff you can find at the dollar store.

It can be hung on a porch or off the corner of a bed as a nightlight. They're strong and waterproof.

This is a fun craft for kids and only takes about 30 minutes to complete.

Step 1: Materials

The construction of these devices is super simple and inexpensive.

To make the solar firefly light, you will need:

Inexpensive solar lawn stab (don't pay more than 1 dollar)
Translucent fabric softener balls
Hot glue gun and glue
Cutting device (craft or pocket knife works fine)

That's it! Total equipment cost was 5 dollars at the local dollar store.

You can use just about any translucent or transparent container for the housing. The first model used a mason jar, but this version uses the fabric softener balls because they are more break resistant, blue, and the ball shape makes it fun to toss around.

Step 2: Take Everything Apart and Stick It Back Together Different

The solar cell and led is on the top of the lawn stab and can be removed by gently pulling the device apart. You could take this a step further and remove all the plastic housing, but some of the components are hot glued to the plastic and the housing keeps the wiring safe.

The fabric softener ball can disassembled in a similar fashion, but with more force. The plastic ring around the top is held on with a small lip, it does not screw off. On the center ring is a tab with a lump of plastic on it. Use your knife to cut along the seams and it will fold off. If you don't want the ring, you can skip this step

Once you have your pieces, it's merely a matter of putting them together. Widen the opening of the ball with your knife and then lodge the solar cell with led and the tab coming down from the ring in that space. Use hot glue to secure all the pieces

At this point you can clean up the glue lines with a putty knife and sugru, or add a little paint. Other than that though, you're done. Make sure to place it in the sun so it can charge.