Floating Candle and Night Sky Tutorial

I dont normally post on Saturday’s but I have so many posts floating around from tutorials to reviews I just want to get it all out!

Today’s tutorial is on the floating candles and night sky for the Harry Potter party!  I found a bunch of images online but couldnt find a great tutorial.  Granted I didnt take step by step pictures so mine isnt great but its better than just a picture!  To get started here is what you need:

• Toilet paper and paper towel rolls
• LED flickering tea candles (here are the ones I used)
• Clear wire or thread (there is acutally clear thread and it worked better than fish wire but use what you have.  I found the thread at Joanns)
• Paper
• Foam Board
• Spray Paint
• Glue

For the night sky:

• basic black fabric
• gold glitter spray paint
• blue glitter spray paint

For the night sky, guys, so simple!!!  Measure your ceiling to get the right measurements.  Take your fabric outside and spread it all out.  Take your spray paint and just make swirls like its the milky way.  Once that is dry, hang it on the ceiling.  We used a staple gun which worked great.  We had 3 panels with the middle one we cut a slit in the middle to go around the chandelier.  Yall, this was seriously so easy and made such a big difference in the room.  With the fabric on sale I think I spent $7 for all of it.

The floating candles were a little more complicated compared to that:

We started collecting the paper towel and toilet paper rolls a few months before the party.  I ended up with around 20 combined.  For a few of the candles I combined two toilet paper rolls to have different height candles.  To do this I just taped the two rolls together.  Simple!

Once you have all your rolls and are ready to start, first thing remove any straggler paper, then spray paint the candles.  I found that white actually didnt work that well so you may want to do a color or, after thought we had but didnt try, wrap the roll in white paper.  Spray painting the candles didnt have a clean look like I wanted but it did the trick.  I think next time I would try wrapping the rolls in paper but that sounds more time consuming.

Once the spray paint has dried you need to get the tops and bottoms situated.  Take a piece of paper and trace enouch circles for all the rolls.  Cut all the circles out and glue to one end of the rolls.  You dont have to do this but candles arent hollow so the paper on the what will eventually be the bottom gives a more authentic look.  I used a glue stick and it worked just fine.  On the below picture you can see the tracing I did, PT stands for paper towel, but as it turns out they were about the same size so I didnt even need to do that 😉

My LED lights ended up being smaller than the rolls so I had to create a “shelf” for them to sit on.  For this I used foam board (very sturdy and wouldnt move under the weight of the light).  Same process as the bottom circle, trace enough for each roll and cut out.  To cut these out I used a razor blade because of the thickness.  These you dont need glue to keep in place, they will be a very tight fit so just man man handle them into place.

Now that you have your candle its time to hang them.  Put 2 holes in the top to pull the thread through and hang at desired height.  we used a staple gun to hang from the ceiling.  There isnt a right or wrong way to do this, just as long as they stay up you are good to go.  Joe did this part for me because honestly I was too stressed at this point in the planning to handle this.

Ok, you have your candles hung and its party time!  Go to each candle and place the LED light on the shelf you made.  I pulled up the string that was running through the middle of the candle to get the LED light to sit under the string.  The string was another level of keeping the LED light in place as well.  Oh and make sure you turn the light on before you put it in the candle.  I did this the day of the party to make sure they battery didnt run out.  You can do it before hand but why take the chance of them going out.  Once the LED lights are in, you are good to go!!!

As it got darker the lights looked even better!  I wish I would have snapped a picture of it but alas I was wiped out and forgot.  I think the candles really added a great ambiance to the Great Hall and were relatively simple to put together.  Oh and so many compliments on this room, I think other than the photobooth this was the best decorated wise.

CHIME IN!!!  What do you think of the floating candles?  Are you a harry potter fan?  Want to do a movie marathon with me?