DIY Paper House Luminaries and Mobile

I designed a paper house template a few years ago and have had lots of fun modifying it into various things from postage stamp holders to haunted house luminaries. Most recently, I used the design to craft a multiple house glowing mobile.

It’s a sweet display lit for evening company, as a housewarming gift or other fun event. Because each house will need to be manually opened and every flameless tealight turned on one at a time, this display lends itself to more of a special occasion decorating piece. However, unlit, it is really sweet as everyday decor.

To make the houses like I did for this project, trim one-sided patterned scrapbook paper into letter-size sheets to feed through your desktop printer. 

Download the FREE Paper House Luminary PDF file and print to the back of each trimmed sheet. My tutorial house shows the printed template lines in black, however, the lines in the actual file will print much lighter so as not to show up in your finished project.

Once printed, trim out each template along the solid line.

Score along each dashed line using a scoring board, or place the paper on a cutting mat and draw along the lines using a straight edge and ballpoint pen, stylist, or other rounded tip implement such as a crochet hook. Scoring will make this project much easier to do and keep your folds accurate so each house folds together correctly.

Don’t forget to cut out the little windows. You can do this at any point, before or after scoring & folding. I used a craft knife and cutting mat.

Cut out, score and fold all of your houses in assembly line. This is a great coffee table project while watching a TV movie.

Fold the panels of the house template along the score lines. The eaves of the house fold back at the ceiling line, in at the roof line, and back again at the roof peaks

Use paper glue to attach the flap on the left side of the house wall to the inside of the house wall on the right. My paper craft adhesive of choice for this project is Beacon 3-IN-1 Craft Glue. Adhere the narrow eaves sections together on the roof flaps (see finished house photos for reference of how the roof eaves are glued.)

Fold the two matching bottom flaps inward. Add a bit of glue to the folded section of the largest bottom flap then tuck and fold it up into the bottom of the house. 

You now have houses that open at the top for dropping in battery operated flameless tealights and are secure enough at the bottom to hold each light.

You can close up your houses with or without small metal binder clips and place the houses about your shelves, with or without flameless tealights.

To make the Paper House Luminary Mobile, I constructed one dozen houses. I used the inside wooden ring of an 8-inch embroidery hoop, some fishing line and small 1/2-inch binder clips for attaching houses to the mobile.

To make a similar mobile with twelve houses, tie and knot four equal lengths of fishing line to four equal sections of the hoop as the hanging string. Pull the four lines up together and tie into a knot keeping the hoop perfectly horizontal. Tie the line above the knot into a loop for hanging the finished mobile from a hook.

Tie and knot three lengths of fishing line to the wooden hoop positioned between each hanging string for a total of twelve hanging house lines.

Loop the end of each fishing line through both folded-back wings of a binder clip then tie and knot each in place. Stagger your houses randomly or equally to allow all to hang nicely and avoiding side-by-side flaring out from being too overcrowded. If you prefer all your houses hanging at the same length, either use a larger hoop or reduce the amount of houses.

Trim away any unnecessary extra fishing line ends.

Turn each flameless tealight’s switch to the on position and drop one into the top opening of each house. Press roof peaks together and hang each house a binder clip attached to the roof’s peak. Then…give your mobile a little spin.

The flameless tealights I found flicker and the effect is really lovely.