Fall flower lights

Here is a fun little project my 9-year-old granddaughter and I did on Saturday afternoon. Some time ago I had seen directions for spring flower lights, made using the bottom part of recycled water bottles. The project intrigued me, even though it looked fairly time-consuming, and so I've been saving water and iced tea bottles all summer.

Well, time went on and it was long past spring by the time I had enough bottles. Summer was nearly over, too. So I thought it might be fun to make them fall flower lights, painting them in fall colors like those of mums or marigolds. We did a very, very simplified version of the idea I had seen.

We cut the bottom off of the plastic water and iced tea bottles. Actually, I had done this part as I went along, to save space in storing the bottles. You can see that they vaguely resemble flowers. I scalloped the edge of each one to make them look more flowerlike. We had Sarah's dad drill a hole in the center of each flower before we painted them.

We just used regular acrylic paints to paint them in fall colors.

Some of the painted flowers.

When the flowers were dry, we slid them onto a string of lights already in place on the garland above the picture window. I took this photo with a flash.

Mr. T took this better one without using a flash.

And those are our super-simple fall flower lights!