Wall-Mounted Tin Can Tea Lights

I absolutely love candles; I love seeing the flames, I love the smell, they’re just awesome to have around. But we have cats who climb on every horizontal surface we own, so it’s a bit dangerous to have lit candles in the house. Luckily, there’s a super easy way to put your candles up on the wall and out of the way: Make some wall-mounted tea light holders out of recycled tin cans!

How cool is that?!

This project is so easy; it took me about ten minutes total. You need:

• empty tuna cans or cat food cans
• paint (spray paint or regular paint is fine)
• tea lights
• scrapbook paper, or any pretty paper
• a gluestick
• washi tape (optional)
• adhesive strips for hanging the cans on the wall

I have been saving our empty cat food tins for months now, and I’m so excited to have finally found a use for them! JM had to stop me from making about twenty of these; for now we just have three. 🙂

I started by cleaning out my can. You don’t want any of that fishy smell left!

Once the cans were clean and dry, I took them outside and gave the insides a quick coat of gold spray paint. You can easily just paint the inside with a brush if you don’t have spray paint, or you can leave them unpainted if you like that silver color.

Once the paint dries, cut a strip of paper to size to cover the outside of the can. Glue one end of the paper down, wrap it around the can, and glue down the other end.

If you want further decoration, wrap a piece of washi tape around the tea light.

I used little foam 3M sticky squares to hang these on the wall. Anything sticky on both sides will work, but be careful because there is a rim around the bottom of the cans that sticks out a bit. Your sticky needs to be thicker than that rim so that the adhesive still hits the wall when you go to hang the can up.

Pretty cool huh?

How do you do candles in your home? Do you have to worry about rambunctious pets like we do? These little cans are actually doubly awesome because they keep the candles away from the cats, and they allow me to decorate with candles even though we don’t have a mantel or any real horizontal decorating surface.