Happy Saturday! Today is the last of my Super Mario paper lantern creations (at least for now). So far we’ve created the Boos and the Cheep Cheeps. Now it’s time to teach you how to make your own Super Mario Urchins.

Why I Created the Urchins…

I described the reasoning behind this last week but as a quick reminder, my husband and I decided to split our basement into two Mario levels: land and water. One of my favorite enemies in the water level is the Urchin because they are just so freaking cute! So naturally, we couldn’t have a water level without the Urchin.

Where to Buy the Materials…

This project continues to use the 10″ paper lanterns I bought off Amazon (3 projects from one $10 order! Pretty awesome if you ask me). Again if you have any mistakes from creating the Boos just use them here! The spray paint should cover any sharpie mistakes.

For this project I used purple (Rust-Oleum Universal Gloss Grape) and yellow (Rust-Oleum Ultra Cover Gloss Sun Yellow) spray paint. I went through a few different options when trying to decide how to create the spikes. I found small cone shaped foam pieces and thought that might work but then came across snowcone wraps in the clearance section for $1.00 (about $7 less than the foam pieces), so I decided to try them out. I also used a hot glue gun, black sharpie and white and pink foam paper (I used the same paper left over from the Cheep Cheeps).

Creating the Urchins…

If you read my post a couple of weeks ago, you remember the picture of my yard covered in a giant tarp for my magical spray painting day. If you need any spray painting tips for the lanterns refer back to my Cheep Cheep post! If you thought spray painting the lanterns was annoying, the snow cone cups are not going to make it any easier. It was a windy day which also made this super difficult, but somehow I made it work. I lined up the snow cone cups inside of a box, held the top down with my finger and did the best to spray paint the cups evenly. When I finished all of them, the paint had dried around the bottom enough to help it stick to the box which made spray painting the tops and additional coats much easier. If you notice in the picture above, my snow cone cups had stripes on them so I had to give them 3-4 coats each in order to make sure the stripes were not visible under the yellow paint. I ended up using an entire can of spray paint for one package of snow cone cups.

After everything was dry, it was time to assemble the Urchins! I again Googled Super Mario Sea Urchin coloring book page to try to find a face that would be easy to trace. You could probably do this free handed since it’s just circles, but if you’re anything like me, drawing a perfect circle is just not my thing. Of course I couldn’t find a coloring book page for this project so I used this picture instead:

I copied and pasted the picture into Microsoft Word and resized the image until I was able to find the size I thought looked best on the lantern. I traced the circles onto the foam paper, cut it out, filled in the eyes and mouth with the Sharpie and glued them to the lantern! I glued the eyes on first and placed the mouth overlapping with the bottom of the eyes.

Next it was time for the spikes. I carefully removed the snow cone cups from the box (they were pretty stuck due to all the spray paint). I then glued them to the paper lantern spaced out as evenly as I could. That’s it! Not complicated at all. We hung them up on the rafters again with fishing wire and ta-da, Super Mario Urchins are now complete!