Weddingbee Blog

There were two things that bothered me about my mocked-up centerpieces. The mats of ribbon didn’t lay flat and the dowel that the lantern hung on was very straight up and down. I know, it’s not earth shattering, but I was itching to fix these two problems.

It was easy to fix the ribbon mats. In my trial I used no-sew iron on fusing to tack the mats together. The heat of the iron made some of the ribbon crinkle and the interfacing refused to stick to some of the ribbon. Ughh… it was a PITA. I also used a couple pieces of wired ribbon- it refused to lay flat- grrrr. To fix these problems, I removed the wire from the ribbon and used liquid stitch glue to tack the ribbons together. Easy- peasy-done!

However, the dowels had me stumped. If you remember, this is how they looked.

The blue dotted line is the dowel and the yellow dotted line is how I wanted the dowel to look. If I could only put a slight bend in the wood. Then Mr Pretzel clued me in on something I am embarrassed to admit I didn’t know. You can easily bend wood. What? You didn’t know either? OK—I feel better now.

So for those of you are in the clueless boat with me, here is how you make bent wood lantern hanging thingies:

Soak your dowels in water for a good 2 hours.

During that 2 hours build yourself a jig to hold the dowels in the shape you want them to conform to. I used four nails and some scrap wood- it took like 5 minutes. Spend the next 1:55 goofing off with the mister and exclaiming how dumb you feel for not knowing that you could bend wood like this.

Place your wet dowels in the jig. I put the dowels on the inside of nails 1 and 4 and the outside of nails 2 and 3. I was able to stack 4 dowels in the jig at a time.

Let the dowels dry completely—I just left them in there for 2 or so days. Get excited that you “bent wood!” Sand the dowel smooth.

Stain or paint the dowels (my original plan was to paint with bright colors but Mr Pretzel convinced me that the wood added another texture to the centerpieces).

Spray with a clear finish. Be sure to spray downwind or you will immediately get light headed—whoops!

Let them dry for an hour. Continue to exclaim how cool it is that you can bend wood this way.

Using a glue gun, glue ribbon to the end of the dowel. Glue the other end to the frame for the paper lantern. Fabric glue didn’t seem to have the holding required, however, I burned my fingers on every one of these because of that darn glue gun. If you have suggestions of how to not burn your fingers, please PM me.

Admire the fruits of your labor.

Much better!

Ohhh Color!

The best part? It packs flat for storage and future shipping to Indiana! YAY!

Now that I’ve got those two problems worked out I feel much better. Whew!

How much tweaking did you find yourself doing on DIY projects?