Engagement Photo Shoot, Pinterest Inspired

We have absolutely fabulous wedding photographers and they encouraged us to think of something unique to bring to our engagement photo shoot. A few weeks prior I emailed and told them about a pin I had seen on Pinterest for DIY Non-Electric Lanterns. The blog it led me to, "Peace of Cake" had one sentence of instructions: break open glow sticks, dump them into an empty jar, close the lid and shake. I had to try it.

Here is the picture that caught my eye:

                               

Once we realized with our work schedules we would really only be able to take our engagement photos at night, I thought these were the perfect inspiration. I tried one out at home and it really is as easy as this blog says, cut open a glue stick - empty into the jar and shake up. I bought 10 packs at Michael's in their dollar aisle. They don't advertise that they sell them on their website, but in their dollar aisle - which might I add is now the $1.50 aisle - they have packs of 12 for $1.50. In the pack are four colors: hot pink, yellow, blue and green. After testing them out, all of the colors looked great - but we used only yellow, blue and green for our shoot.

I used mason jars (also from Michael's) and tied the lids with burlap string so we could hang them if necessary. Then once we were at the site we starting cutting the glow sticks, dumping them in and hanging them all over trees.  In order to make them glow as bright as we did we put two and sometimes three glow sticks in each jar.

My only complaint about these are that they only last about an hour (max!).  If you freeze them they do last a bit longer - upwards of three hours - but that wasn't an option for us since we were coming from work. 

You can easily wash out the glow stick material from the jars and re-use them, and any glow-stick juice that gets on your clothes doesn't stain! 

Our photographer was phenomenal and knew the perfect spot and time these would look like magic. Make sure to check out their blog:C & I Photographers. The link to our full engagement photo session is here.  Here are how our pictures turned out: