This is my first time doing a guest post, so I’m very excited about it. I’m part of the Awesome Red White Blue Series over at Sugar Bee Crafts. There are new and different projects posted daily designed to get you fired up about the 4th of July! Be sure to check out all the other amazing projects over there!
I decided to create some red white and blue 4th of July themed solar lights. It all started when I found the lights at the Dollar Store, love that place! They were cute to start with, but I added a little paper, washi tape and flowers and now they are way cute!
I started off by doing a shopping for digital scrapbooking supplies at my favorite digi scrap online shop, The Digi Chick. I found the perfect digital scrapbooking kit chock full of red white and blue beautiful papers, tons of elements and even three full alpha sets. It’s called Land of the Free.
After I had decided on the kit I turned my attention to the cutting files section of The Digi Chick. I knew I needed something that had the basic shape of a lampshade. I knew that The Digi Chick would not let me down! Sometimes they have exactly what you have in mind and sometimes you have to use your imagination. This time I had to put on my thinking cap. I came across the Pilgrim Hat Box cutting file set by Girl Boy Girl Designs. She is one of my favorite designers. I figured the hat had the basic shape I needed so I was all set. If you’ve never used cutting files you don’t know what you’ve been missing. They are so easy to work with, especially if you have a cutting system like a Silhouette Cameo. I sold my old Cricut Expression last year and bought a Cameo and I’ve never looked back. Of course if you don’t have a cutting system all the cutting file sets come with the images in different file types, like pdf or psd so that you can use whatever program you have and cut them out by hand.
I had to resize the pilgrim hat box to fit the lights which took a couple of attempts, but I finally got it sized right. Here is one of the little lampshades just after it came out of the Cameo.
This is the lampshade after I folded on all the proper places. Still doesn’t look like much of a shade huh?
All I had to do to finish the shade was stick it all together in the right places using double sided tape.
Last step was the fun part – decorating the shade. I didn’t want to add too much detail to the shades for a couple of reasons. One is that the shades are pretty small and there wasn’t a lot of room to add stuff. The other is that I didn’t want to add so much extra stuff that the shade became too cluttered or thick and blocked out the light. I used some washi tape around the top and some paper flowers around the bottom. I love the way they turned out!
Here is another photo of the solar lights with their shades in action!
