Halloween Ball Luminary

This Halloween Ball turned out fantastic! I have hints and tips and pictures of what NOT to do to make this Halloween Ball. FYI I had to make about four of these before I got it all right. You won’t have to though because I’m going to warn you not to make the same mistakes I did.

With the light inside of it this looks AMAZING! The pictures don’t even capture how good it looks! It takes a lot of patience to put this together but when it is done, WOW.

And I have some pictures of what I did with the cutouts at the end.

What you will need

- - - Orange and Black cardstock
    - Vellum
    - glue gun
    - liquid glue
    - a small battery operated light
    - lots and lots of patience
    - Download File

Paper Selection

I stuck to the standard Halloween colors. You could make this all one color, too. Patterned paper looks nice but when it is dark and you light it up you can’t really see the pattern. The vellum needs to be light. I tried black vellum and it didn’t glow well.

Cutting the Halloween Ball Luminary

This is fairly straight forward to cut out. Be sure to save the cut out pieces. Some of them are very useful for other projects. I have some of my examples at the end of this tutorial.

Assembly

This is where it gets tricky. The first thing to do is re-crease the score lines. Then you want to attach the vellum to the back of the circles. The “Happy Halloween” is the only one where you have to be careful about which side at this point. Make sure the vellum is inside the folds. I glued the vellum with tape glue on the cardstock so that the glue isn’t visible.

Next fold the creases on each circle opposite the vellum. I attempted to do this the other way so that the tabs tucked in. That Halloween Ball Luminary was a disaster.

You can see the gaps and uneven pieces. If I had more patience maybe I could get it to work but that is NOT me.

Gluing

Once all the Halloween ball luminary pieces are creased, start gluing them together. A glue gun is best here. It holds firmly and quickly. Start at the bottom and work your way up alternating colors the best you can. Put the glue on one tab for each pair of tiles. Be sure that they are right side up. It matters for some, others it doesn’t. You need to keep aware of which side is up. (Yes, I had to take it apart on several occasions because something was upside down.)

When you get to the top, only glue one side of the top piece to the ball. That gives you a hatch to insert the light. (Yes,I glued it all down and then couldn’t insert my light.) Don’t worry, it stays down because of the tight fit.

Finishing

Once your Halloween Ball is done, turn on the light and put it inside and be amazed at how wonderful it looks! I don’t hang my Halloween Ball Luminary but it wouldn’t be hard to attach a ribbon in the side of the top that you glued.

What to do with the Cutouts

I used the cutout pieces to make cards. Here are some of them. They are attached to marbleized cards that I will post how to do someday.