DIY Pressed Flower Lanterns | Oui Jar Upcycling

These pressed flower lanterns are a great craft idea for both kids and grown-ups. You can press your own flowers using my tutorial or you can buy them online. You'll also need a small glass jar and a tea light or votive candle. Some scissors will come in handy as well as some tweezers and you'll want mod podge, we'll talk about that more later, as well as a paintbrush and some jute twine or ribbon. I love upcycling items that would normally be trash so I'm using these wee yogurt jars. I took off the labels and then used a little bit of Goo Gone to remove some of that glue residue. I'm using this brand new Mod Podge Multi Formula. It comes in matte and also a gloss formula. I'm going to show you the difference because there is a difference in the finish and I think you're going to be interested in seeing how they compare. I'm going to start with the matte finish and I'm just applying a very thin coat here with my paintbrush. Then I'll choose one of my flowers here. I'm going to start with kind of a purple and maybe red theme here. So once I place the flower I'm just going to gently press it down and then we'll continue with the same process around the entire glass jar. I do want to cover a few basics though about the types of flowers you should choose. You'll want to choose relatively small flowers with flat faces and single layers of petals work best. You can see I'm struggling with this rose here because it's too thick so I'm going to ditch this and pick some different flowers to continue working around the glass. Scissors come in handy when you have flowers with long stems. I'm going to trim this one up a little bit. You can do this in advance as well if you don't want to be doing this as you go along. After you finish adding your flowers you'll go and fill in any space between the flowers and also cover the flowers with a top layer of Mod Podge. I am really digging this new Mod Podge formula. Again it's called Mod Podge Multi. You can use it indoors or outdoors. It's kind of like Mod Podge Outdoor mixed with regular Mod Podge and it's also dishwasher safe and machine washable if you do a fabric project. So I'm really excited to try this on a few more projects. You'll probably see this in some of my future videos and if you're not subscribed now is a great time to hit that subscribe button and ring the bell so that you'll be notified when I post new videos. For my next glass jar I used the Mod Podge Multi Gloss and this time I laid out my flowers beforehand which was a big help. I even tested whether they would lie flat so I highly suggest doing that and then I just repeated the same process going all the way around the glass jar. This is what it looks like right after you put that top layer of Mod Podge. We're going to come back in about 30 minutes to show you what it looks like once it's dry. Here's our first matte Mod Podge jar that we did and you can see it has almost a frosted glass look. I went ahead and added jute twine around the top and here you can see the difference between the matte finish on the left and the gloss finish on the right. The gloss is much more transparent whereas the matte again looks like frosted glass. I love using tea lights in my pressed flower lanterns but you can also use a votive candle or even an LED instead. This is just one of many pressed flower crafts that you can do. I'm going to leave these videos for you to watch next if you're interested in learning more about drying flowers and I'll see you here next time!