Garden Lighting – lighting for parties

While you can actually just pick up your table lamps, plonk them down outside and connect them to your indoor sockets with extension cables, there are many more exciting ways to light your garden space for an evening party.

1. Use your fire to give light – if you’re not actually barbecuing, you can use the grill space, filled with candles to illuminate that area of the garden, or turn in the built in light if you have one, and set a huge bucket of ice beneath it. People can use the ice to chill their drinks and the juxtaposition of light and ice doubles the reflective effect.
2. Outdoor flowers and lights – fill wine coolers or colourful painted buckets with bunches of cut flowers to dress up a terrace or poolside and put tea lights in a circle around the base to cast a glow up into the flowers
3. Candles miniature white lights strung between trees or posts, or white paper lanterns dangling from trees can supplement built-in lighting and take a patio from ordinary to spectacular. To make a plain fence look festive, fling a net of lights over it – these can be purchased from Christmas supply shops and give a skein of light that is both safe and pretty.
4. You can buy flaming torches that run off gas cylinders – they look wonderful but make sure they are located where people will not bump into them, swing plates, hair or the edges of floating clothes into them, or stick their fingers into them to check if they are ‘real’. The best place is to set them high on a wall either side of a wooden seat.
5. If you have garden nooks for people to sit in, line them with strings of fairy lights so that they twinkle invitingly through the dusk. Alternatively, pick out the legs of garden chairs with short strings of lights.

Lighting for parties photograph by flikr, used under a creative commons attribution licence

 

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