We’re Ready to Party, We’re Ready

I hope you bring lots of spaghetti!

Max’s party is this weekend, is what I’m saying.

Now, we don’t always have one but we wanted to give Max a birthday party this year. A really awesome party. A party that he’s going to remember and look back on fondly as ‘that time I had a really cool birthday party.’ However, it’s not in the budget (nor is it our style) to rent a pavilion at the zoo, or hire a clown and bounce houses, or take a weekend trip to Disneyworld. In short, we were looking for a cheap way to trick out our living and dining room for maximum birthday awesomeness.

The answer (probably to no one’s surprise) was balloons!

Now, here’s the thing. Balloons are cheap. It’s the helium that gets expensive! You don’t really need it though, balloons add enough color and fun without it – you just need a place to hang them. In the past this has indeed been a sticking point, as tape won’t stay and any other options involved driving a hole through the wall unless you happened to want balloons where you already had something hanging (curtain rods, etc). However, this year I happened to have most of a pack of Command hooks left over from hanging garland at Christmas, and so it was game on.

I had originally planned to make a balloon banner à la Design Mom, but I decided that a banner four balloons thick would just be a little much for our living room. Instead, I ran some yarn from the hook on the end to the hook in the middle, and then another piece from that hook to the hook on the other end. Then, I tied a small piece of yarn around each individual balloon and tied it around the yarn up on the wall. This gave me the distinct advantage of being able to slide the balloons up and down as I added more balloons. Then I added some loopy crepe paper things to each end, and it’s well on its way to awesome-land.

That’s not all, though!

We made clusters of three balloons and stuck them in the corners, then hung a little more crepe paper between them. That’s another benefit of using the hooks – they did a great job holding up the streamers as well as the balloons. We hung another pair of balloon clusters and another pair of streamers just like this on the wall opposite, above the window.

So! 2 packs of blue balloons + 1 pack of orange balloons + 1 roll of dark blue crepe paper + 1 roll of light blue crepe paper = $5. Covering the house in ballons? Priceless.

Oh, and if you’re wondering about all the blue and orange –

There’s more on the way.