Weddingbee boards

There has been a lot of discussion around here about lighting your paper lanterns with LEDs, and we are actually doing that with our smaller lanterns.  I just thought I'd toss out another suggestion, especially for larger lanterns.  If you hang one of those "As Seen on TV" stick-up light bulbs upside down in your lantern, it gives a brighter and less blue light than I've been able to achieve with LEDs.

Right now, there is an Amazon seller who is selling these for $2.99 each, plus one $2.99 shipping charge no matter how many you order.  Each one takes four AA batteries.  I found those for $32 for 100 on eBay, including the shipping.  So, for 25 of them, including batteries, the cost would be just over $100.

They are easy to set up, as you can use fishing line to hold the base in place, then snap the light into it.  Because they have a pull cord, it is easy to turn the lights on and off.  Below is a picture of an 18" paper lantern lit by one of these.

The stick-up light bulbs are made of plastic, not glass.  And they are cool to the touch, even when in use.  The light bulb in them is actually an LED bulb, but it is bigger and brighter than the commonly available LEDs, and the plastic has some sort of a color to it that seems to eliminate the blue tint.

This is so cool!! I was so shoked about how expensive this could be - Thank you for sharing!!

Just a follow-up on this:  We had three sizes of lanterns at our reception.  The first was battery-operated lanterns, 9" high by 8" wide.  The second was round white 10" lanterns.  The third was 18" natural irregular ribbed ones.  The 10" lanterns were lit with throwies, and the 18" ones were lit with Westinghouse Stick-Up Light Bulbs.

Of the three, the battery operated lanterns were the least successful.  Although easy to light (they had a little switch on the bottom), they were the least bright.  Also, the batteries ran down within about 2-3 hours.

The Westinghouse Stick-Up Light Bulbs produced the brightest light.  They also lasted about 5-6 hours, which was as long as we needed for our reception.

The throwies last the longest.  All of ours were still burning at the end of the reception, and other reports say they will last for at least three days.  They were not as bright as the Westinghouse bulbs.  Also, if the white LEDs were used, they looked a bit blue.  We compensated for this by having half of the lanterns lit with a mixture of white and red LEDs (producing a pink light) and half lit with amber LEDs.

The lighting effects at the wedding (paper lanterns plus pink uplighting) ended up looking magical, and really making the decor.  Here is a picture from our reception:

My comprehensive article on ways to light paper lanterns just won first place in the Project Wedding DIY Wedding Challenge 2010.  Those who are interested can check out the article at this link.