Summer Fun

My dad's birthday and this year's Mother's Day happened to be right next to each other, so I decided to combine the two events into one fun event. Why? Because I'm hella lazy.

In the last post, I made the mason jar lanterns especially for this event. I decided that we'd have a nice little summer "picnic" in our backyard. To make it a bit more festive than just sitting around, I made these flags by taping triangle paper sheets to a piece of twine.





My sister helped me hang this up. We created this somewhat rectangular shape around the eating area.



She and I set up this low table that I got from Nur for $10. I get a lot of stuff from Nur. We picked these flowers that my mom planted around the house and my sister arrange them in small wine glasses.



She did a wonderful job! She also spent a good 20 minutes (maybe more) blowing all of the ants on the flowers. I guess the pollen were pretty sweet because these pink flowers were swarming with them and my sister had a policy of not killing any of them.



We lined the 3 flower "vases" in the middle of the table and placed two lanterns in between them. I got some rose petals (also from the backyard) and sprinkled them along the vases. It was nice that the table was already white so all of the colors popped out really well.



I thought it would be cute to have place cards, so I used some old greeting cards, turned them inside out and wrote our names on it.







This is the general set up.





We went around the yard and hung up the lanterns on tree branches.



Since it was a "summer picnic," I decided to make a fancy fruit bowl. I was very proud of my pineapple carving the Asian way because it was a lot of work.



My mom had half a watermelon in the fridge so I decided to used that for a fruit basket. Since I didn't have a melon baller, it was a bit challenging to remove the watermelon from its rind. It took some time, but I finished it well and filled it back with watermelon pieces, pineapples, strawberries, and blueberries.






When I was taking the photos, Sophie decided to come by to investigate.



My dad set up the grill and we grilled some garden burgers and vegetables.




That was me pretending to do work.



My sister set up the camera and tripod for photos. She and my dad got some fun testing it out.




The birthday dad!


My mom came out and we had a few photos taken together.









Finally, a normal photo!




We are so photogenic. After all the silliness, we sat down to feast!





I got my mom a pretty summer hat!





When the sun set, the lanterns were lit. It was magical.




All in all, I think it was a great night of fun. A bit of work, but everything turn out to be very pretty. What made my mom really satisfied was that we did not buy any flowers. Instead, we just spent a lot of time in the heat picking the flowers.

It was fairly easy to set up. All you need are a few pieces of paper, some twines, jars, candles, food, and some flowers.

Mason Jar Hanging Lanterns

I've been seeing a few posts on craft blogs on how to make lanterns out of mason jars here and there. A lot of them use wires to create a hanging point for the lanterns. Since I do not have wire nor a wire cutter, I thought of using twine instead. Here are some blogs that have directions on how to make mason jar lanterns using wires:

ReadyMade
Make it do
Oh Lovely Day
Chez Beeper Bebe

These are only some of the numerous DYI instructions found by Google when I typed in "mason jar lantern." I found one that uses twines to hang the mason jars at BlogHer. This idea was very cute but I didn't want to make it very complicated.

Below is my lazy way of making mason jar lantern for a fun summer night in the backyard.




I got 10 of the 8 oz. Eco mason jar at Specialty Bottle for $0.88/ea. I saved all of the lids, of course, for future use.




A roll of hemp twine from Michael's. The beefy kind.

After researching some knots, I decided to use the Alpine butterfly knot because it's the easiest one to do and it provides a strong loop with minimal knotting. The Wikipedia page has very clear instructions. I'll also give a quick photo guide on how to do it here.




Measure out about 80 inches of twine. Fold it. Make sure that one side is longer than the other side approximately 1 circumference of the jar's mouth.




Make an open loop at the fold.




Twist the loop once.




Twist the loop again. Holding the loops as pictured, take the top loop (colored in red) and turn it down toward the pinky finger and you'll get the configuration as shown below.




Now the red loop is at the bottom, push it under and through the blue loop...




...like so. Then tug at the side and top to tighten the knot.




Alpine butterfly knot, success!




Wrap the twine around a mason jar right below the screw ridges like so.


Take the longer piece of the twine and wrap it around the jar once. You should end up directly across from the butterfly loop. Tie a knot there.




Start twisting the two pieces of twine around each other.






At the end, insert both twine ends into the butterfly loop you made earlier and tie a knot to secure it. Trim extra twine as necessary.




Ta-da! I also got black sand from Michael's to keep the candle in place.

I had a lot of fun making these lanterns and was very proud of the end result. My sister helped me pour sand and place all candles in the jars. We hung them up on the cherry and jujube trees in the backyard.