Last year's lantern setup!

Above is one of the setups we've used to showcase the lanterns that will illuminate the four gates to the garden. We built these over several weeks leading up to Burning Man 2010. The pattern for each face was designed in Adobe Illustrator, and then laser-cut into 1/4 inch craft plywood at Techshop in San Mateo, CA. We covered the wood with painter's tape before putting it in the laser cutter to avoid charring the surface. To assemble each lantern, we screwed the faces into a 3/4 inch square post at each of the vertical edges. By themselves, our RGB LEDs wouldn't light the lanterns evenly, but we discovered a simple trick to diffuse the light: We covered each LED with a small plastic salsa cup from a nearby restaurant.