Paper Lantern Templates — Slit Lantern, Jack-o'-Lantern & Star-Window (Cut & Fold)
Three printable paper lantern nets: the classic slit lantern with a handle strip, a jack-o'-lantern cylinder with a cut-out face, and a four-panel star-window lantern. Cut lines, fold lines, glue tabs, and a legend on every page.
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What is paper lantern templates? Paper lantern templates are cut-and-fold nets (slit lantern, jack-o'-lantern cylinder, star-window lantern) with cut lines, fold lines, glue tabs, and a handle strip, lit with a battery LED tea light.
How to make paper lantern templates: Pick a lantern and size, preview the net, download the PDF, print on cardstock, cut the solid lines and hatched windows, fold the dashed lines, glue the tab, and add an LED tea light — never a flame.
The slit lantern is the first lantern most of us ever made
Fold a rectangle in half, cut a row of slits from the fold toward the open edge, unfold, curl into a tube, glue — the slit lantern is the first-grade classic for Christmas, Diwali, Lunar New Year, and St. Martin's Day lantern walks, and it works because of one piece of geometry: when you push the top and bottom rims toward each other, every strip between two slits has nowhere to go but outward, so the lantern bows into a barrel. The template here is a 20 × 13.5 cm body with 14 slits that stop 2 cm short of each edge; the uncut bands are what keep the strips attached. Add the 20 × 1.5 cm handle strip and it hangs from a stick for a procession.
Paper choice: 160–200 gsm cardstock curls into a tube that holds its shape and survives being carried; construction paper is easier for small hands to cut but sags in damp weather. For the jack-o'-lantern cylinder and the star-window lantern you cut shapes out of the panels, so glue a square of tissue paper, vellum, or baking parchment behind each window before rolling or folding — orange tissue turns a 24 × 12 cm wrap into a glowing porch luminary, and white vellum behind the stars gives a soft lantern-walk glow. Cut windows on a mat with a craft knife; a kid can do the outer cut lines with scissors while an adult handles the windows.
Lighting: only ever use a battery LED tea light. A paper tube over a candle is a fire, not a lantern. LED tea lights sit inside the slit lantern or the jack-o'-lantern on the table; the square star lantern simply stands over one. For a Halloween porch, print the jack-o'-lantern at Standard size six times, line a path with them, and set a flickering LED in each — they survive the night and fold flat for next year.
All three nets print with a shared legend (solid = cut, dashed = fold, hatched = remove), a glue tab on the left, and a handle strip. The Small option prints at 75 % for tea-light-sized lanterns or for fitting a net onto a single sheet of coloured A4 cardstock. If the page is portrait or the net is wider than the sheet, the page states the exact printed percentage so you can match several lanterns to the same size.