I haven’t blogged much about this, but I’ve been spending a few days a week volunteering in Chinatown with senior citizens. What started as a couple of English classes has morphed into craft class coordinator, field trip chaperone, citizenship class teacher’s aide, and party helper. In short, a Jill of all trades.
Today was one of my favorite classes yet. I’ve started working with a group of senior women who are quite artistic. My job is to come up with a craft and kind of lead it, although they are much more crafty than I. The staff member who overseas this class asked me last week if we could make lanterns out of red envelopes. She showed me a model, so I set to work on finding the red envelopes.
And this is how we made the lanterns. We first folded them in half, then folded down each corner.
Then we stapled the top corners of five envelopes to make one side of the lantern.
There was a middle section of five envelopes that formed a band around the center of the lantern.
One of the students wanted me to take a photo of her lantern. We sat next to each other and I sometimes helped staple the envelopes. There was a lot of stapling involved!
Here are more of our almost-finished lanterns!
And finally, we made firecrackers to hang on string from the bottom of the lantern. Our hour and a half had run out before we could hang the firecrackers, but we’ll get to it next week.
These were so easy that I’m probably going to buy more red envelopes tomorrow to make with my kids.
That looks really cool.
Thank you so much!
I love these, amazing! We are going to do them at our work, definitely a great idea! Thanks for sharing Susan!
Those are super cute! And I love the idea of hanging little fireworks from the bottom! So festive.
Thanks so much! You can make them, too. They’re so easy and lots of fun to put together. At the end of the 90 minutes, the ladies kept saying “hoi sum, hoi sum.” Happy in Cantonese!