DIY Tea Light Holder

I love decorating with tea lights all year round and finally decided to start making my own teal light holder crafts.

Way back in the day when I used to be single and didn’t have the attention span of a squirrel, I used to have real tea lights. I love the small unscented ones that you could get a boatload of for a few bucks. They were such an easy way to add a bit of ambiance without too much effort.

These days, with small kids around and general multi-tasking around the clock, I don’t quite feel comfortable leaving an open flame sitting there even if it’s a small one so I stick to the LED tea lights.

There are many ways to play up a basic tea light, especially if it is a flameless one.

I love lots of recycled jar based craft projects if you want to use glass but this particular tutorial will be focused on cardstock and other paper crafts you can do with tea light holders.

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Materials for paper tea light craft ideas

Cardstock – I love using medium to heavy weight cardstock for these types of projects. I used metallic paper for the ones featured in the photos. Here are a few of my favorite brands:

Assorted Starter Pack – Basic assorted colors, great starter pack, perfect weight for most papercraft projects
Cricut Joy Insert Card Packs – You don’t have to use these with the Cricut Joy, they are nice material kids for cardmaking.
Cardstock Warehouse Brand on Amazon – I love the quality of all the matte-colored cardstock with Cardstock Warehouse. It is my go-to brand for individual matte colors that I might need
Poptone Assorted Variety Pack – This is the perfect peppy assortment of colors of heavy cardstock. It’s a heavy cardstock assortment with colors I actually use frequently for cardmaking.
Seasonal Assorted Variety Pack – This is a slight variation on the Poptone assortment and has a quite few neutrals that complement almost any accent color.
Stardream Metallics Line – For paper crafts, the Stardream line is the go-to for a metallic shimmer finish. It is the perfect sheen to make any project pop. The core is also colored is which hard to find for metallic paper.

Glue – Any type of glue works here. Here are my standard go to brands:

Cutting Machine – I use a Cricut. Check out my recommendations for Cricut machines and accessories for beginners for more info.

Templates – The templates for the tea light holder decorations featured in this article are available in both SVG and printable PDF formats for free in my resource library.

Tips for decorating tea lights

These cardstock paper tea light holders are super simple to make. The most difficult part is probably just cutting out the templates themselves.

I use my Cricut cutting machine to cutout each layer. For this designs, I found the light grip blue mat to be sufficient in holding the paper down enough without snagging. I like using the light grip mat whenever possible because it makes clean up so much easier. The standard grip sometimes is too sticky and curls the paper too much when lifted.

After cutting the templates, I like add a little curl to the petals. This can be done with any type of scraping device like a ruler or credit card.

The thicker and heavier weight the cardstock, the longer it will hold the curl.

For final assembly, just glue the layers together. Be sure to offset the petals. Sometimes, if I want to add a little elevation, I might add some foam tape between each layer instead of the glue.

With the right metallic cardstock, it almost looks like you have a metallic holder, except it was much cheaper to make and easy to swap out on a whim.

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