Who doesn’t like holiday lights? Those little twinklers convey such an easy to come by sense of magic and seasonal enchantment. Here are a number of fun projects we’ve featured over the years to help inspire some of your own ideas for making strings of lights, augmenting your lights with crafty projects, and keeping your lights on.
Paper Stars for Christmas Lights
Make: contributor Ben Light shows you how to turn lowly manila envelopes into lovely stars to be added to strings of Christmas lights.
Light-Up Christmas Presents
A Dragon Made from 12,000 Christmas Lights
After coming home from a Burning Man, this maker was inspired to create a 25′ dragon comprised of 12,000 holiday lights.
How-To: Candy Lights
Here’s a project that turns your strings of lights into strings of colorful, holiday hard candy.
Jumbo Styrofoam Sequined Christmas Lights
In this craft project, Andi of Jane of All Crafts uses balls of Styrofoam and sequin trim to create strings of colorful, sequined Christmas faux-lights.
Battery-Powered Christmas Lights
Check out this informative write-up on how to use holiday lights with battery power. It was written primarily for the incandescent-based lights, but LED strings will work even better than bulbed ones.
Christmas Lights from Camping
Want to make your camping experience a little more festive? This piece on Christmas tree lights for camping is not really about holiday decorating your pup tent, it’s about using cheap strings of battery-powered lights as an alternative light source for camping.
Troubleshooting Dead Light Strings
John Graham-Cumming, of Geek Atlas fame, asks the musical question “Why do Christmas lights all go out when one bulb blows?” (the old-school in-series non-LED variety). He then shows you ye ol’ nerd-friendly “binary chop” technique for quickly rooting out the dead bulb.
How-To: Repair Christmas Lights
Another useful tutorial on how to troubleshoot and fix strings of Christmas lights.
Making Your Own Custom Light Strings
Save money and create exactly the custom light strings that you need following this simple guide. It’s easier than you think.
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