Ladies Craft Night: Sky Lantern Fail

Hey Pie in the Sky Eyed Crafters,

Ladies Craft Night had an interesting trial run working with Sky Lanterns. I think every young woman thinks these brightly glowing, floating, paper lanterns are super magical and idyllic. The Ladies and I found them to be the EXACT opposite.

I found a Groupon that made ten Sky Lanterns $25 plus S&H (about $8). It is one of our more expensive crafts but we all wanted to take a crack at floating one of these babies in the night sky. When they arrived we decided to wait out dusk on a picnic blanket in the park and snack and chat. I picked an evening with little to no wind and a park with a lake thinking that the lanterns would be less of a fire hazard in case they floated into the lake.

We decided, after realizing we had many unanswered questions, that we would send up a single test lantern.  Not knowing how far away our lantern would go, how fast it would travel, how long it would burn we decided to follow it so we could pick up the wire frame (the paper would biodegrade but not that frame) and make sure we weren't setting our neighborhood on fire.

The first thing we realized is that this lantern is made of paper and if we're not careful, we could light the whole kit and caboodle on fire. I held the small wire frame, another held the paper part upright, and a third lady lit the fuel pack provided with the lantern.

The bag they come in says Sky Lanterns can go up to 3,000 feet and we wondered whether that was horizontal or vertical. We soon learn that it is horizontal. This paper bag can move! After about 7 seconds of Ooo-ing, we realize that it was on the move and immediately split into two teams, one on foot and one in a vehicle.

In the end we lost that darned Sky Lantern. We haven't the foggiest where the frame ended up but I believe that the fuel pack dies, then the lantern just floats to the ground with no danger of setting anything on fire.

This is a BK's Craft Blog first: A video! This video shows our first and only attempt at launching a Sky Lantern. You can see just how quickly our joy turns to safety awareness. Right after the video stops, we immediately split into teams to track the lantern.

This week we are trying a modified version of the Sky Lantern (since we had 9 left!) by tying a length of yarn to the wire frame so we can control their height making them...FIRE KITES! Stay tuned for Part 2 for the exciting conclusion of Sky Lanterns!

BK