And you thought arcade games were dead

If you need a break from surfing the web, I suggest you head on over to Google for a fun little distraction. Google’s logo is a playable pac-man game! And if you’re feeling inspired, how about celebrating pac-man’s 30th birthday by making your own Pac-man paper lantern?

DIY: Stash Bust: Pacman Paper Lantern

Today I decided to try out the Paper Lantern Ornament tutorial by The Creative Place. I suggest you follow the excellent tutorial to make them yourselves. They’re easy to make (if you don’t mind fiddling around a bit, that is) and make a wonderful decoration for a table and you can use stuff you have lying around at home, which makes it the perfect project for the April Stash Bust.

At first I went traditional and decided to cut up old, yellow pages from a book my Mom gave me. The paper is really thin, which made it rather fiddly to work with.

 
But I was quite pleased with the result:

The way it sat there, it almost reminded me of a pumpkin. They’d be cute to make in orange paper for Halloween. Use a green brad for the stem, paint on a face and you’d have the perfect decoration for a Halloween party. So this got me thinking about other shapes.

I grabbed some scraps of yellow paper. If you only have a regular hole punch like I do and can’t fit all of your strips into it at once, here’s a quick tip. Punch the first half of your strips, then gather all of them together and mark the center of the hole on the unpunched half. If you remove the bottom of your hole punch you can turn it upside down, insert the second half of the strips and position them with the mark you made to ensure the holes will match up.

I used only 13 strips for this lantern, but did the rest according to the tutorial. And what do you end up with?

It’s a pacman! I colored and cut out some white paper to make the eyes. Attach them with glue dots and you’re done. If you want you can cut out some yellow dots for your little pacman to eat as well.