Cuisine & Culture the Chinese Family Way
This Chinese New Year Candy ang pow lantern is more fanciful and beautiful than a simple plain Chinese lantern. It is like an upgrade to a more complicated looking lantern and it does not require any more materials than a simple lantern, except a pair of scissors. It also looks like a candy wrapper.
Happy New Year to everyone! I have made this Chinese New Year Pineapple Craft. It is almost the time of the year for Chinese to celebrate our Chinese New Year! This coming lunar year is the Fire Monkey. If you are in Asia or UK Chinatown, you would have probably seen lot of colourful, vibrant decorations.
Over the past year, I have blogged the step-by-step for creating various Chinese crafts e.g. Ang Pow Lantern, Fan, Firecracker etc. I have also written posts on Chinese New Year culture like how we celebrate the festivities in Singapore and UK. Do check them out if you are interested to find out more about Chinese culture.
This is my Chinese New Year ang pow flower lantern tutorial. If you would like to learn about other lantern designs I had made previously, do take a look at my Pinterest board for Chinese New Year.
Cutting paper is one of my favourite childhood crafts. I still remember fondly helping my mother to cut the Chinese characters to paste onto food items for offering to the Buddha and his followers.
My two sisters-in-law are big fans of Hello Kitty so when I came across some Hello Kitty Ang Bao/Pow when I was last in Singapore, I bought some for them. I bought some for myself too and with these, I decided to make a lantern.
During this month, I am going to write a series of Chinese New Year posts from making lanterns, zodiac, Feng Shui to Chinese culture. This is my first blog post of my Chinese New Year series. Look out for the rest of the posts! Today, I am going to use Ang Pow (red packets) to make a Fish Lantern. So what is an Ang Pow? It is a red envelope/packet that contain a monetary gift which is given during Chinese New Year or special occasions like weddings or birthdays etc. They are called Hong Bao (红包) in Mandarin or Ang Pow/Bao in Singapore Hokkien or Lai See in Cantonese. Click here to read more about it.
Mid-Autumn Festival is also know as Lantern Festival or Mooncake Festival in Singapore. For every festival, there are lanterns hanging across the street and children showing off their beautiful lanterns. I still remember I used to hold a paper folded red lantern and sometimes it would catch fire if I swing it around. Now the lantern are battery operated so it will be safe for children. Each year, the lanterns are getting more and more fanciful.
This is a very simple and straightforward Chinese Lantern. The rating of difficulty is 1 out of 5. This is a very small lantern, which measures approximately 13 cm, not including the length of the Chinese knot tassel and string. It is an such easy craft for children to do and won’t take more than 15 minutes to do. It will make a great Chinese New Year theme craft for younger children. You can also make more than one lantern and join them all in a vertical roll or horizontally as a banner.
