Remember my teacher friend from previous posts? It’s been a hot second since I talked about her, but she’s back! For her classroom this year, she themed it Harry Potter. And because she trusts my creativity(?), she asked for input. So I helped decorate her classroom. One of the things I came up with were floating candles to hang from the ceiling. Here’s how I made them.
Supplies I used:
- Hair rollers from Dollar Tree
- Paint–light blue and white–from WalMart
- Plastic wire typically made for making jewelry. I grabbed this from my jewelry making kit and don’t remember where I got it but I’m sure you can get it anywhere that sells jewelry making stuff
- Orange construction paper
- Paper clips
Because the rollers were dark blue, painting it white over it immediately wouldn’t give a good effect, so I painted all the rollers in a light blue paint. These rollers have plastic ends on them, and since only one side will be visible I painted one end but not the other. This’ll actually help in the long run.
Once the blue dried, I thought I’d be good to go for white. Well, word to the wise, paint one end first, because what’ll happen is the blue will come off with the white if you touch the wet paint. So, I painted the majority of the candle white, waited for it to dry, then painted the rest of it white. Now I have white, flameless candles.
Here’s why it was good not to paint over both ends: I was able to secure the plastic wire around the plastic end piece and tie it so it wouldn’t randomly fall off. Once I’ve got plastic wire on every. single. candle, I cut out tons of flame twins out of orange construction paper. And I don’t know why I didn’t get a pic of this (good job, Alexandra), but I put the flame twins against each other on the plastic wire so the stay up.
Then I attached the plastic wire on a paper clip slightly opened (again, no pics, Alexandra?). The paper clip goes into the ceiling, and if you know public school ceilings you know that they are cardboard tiles, practically. So I put the open end of the paper clip in the tile borders and the candles are thus floating!
I only made a solid 18, but from what my teacher friend told me the kids really like them. And I suppose that was the point, lol. It all worked out, and it cost less than 10 dollars.
If you decided to do this, or even have a different way of doing this, let me know! I would love to see.
Hugs
Alexandra
Alexandra TG 