I’ve always loved balloon garlands and knew I wanted to make one for Crosby’s party. I cannot even begin to tell you how much research/YouTube watching I did to prep for this garland. I was prepared for battle, but it honestly wasn’t that bad! I want to share what worked for me, in case it can be helpful if you’re trying to making something similar.
– Materials you’ll need –
- balloons – everything I’d read said you’d need hundreds so I probably over-bought. The most important thing is buying different sizes. I bought several bags of 5″, 9″ and 12″
- air pump – I bought 2 of these and they worked fine, but a pump like this would probably be a lot easier.
- gaffers tape – this is the one I bought in white. It was super strong and held everything up with no problems.
- poultry wire – one roll should be plenty. This is what you’ll use to shape your garland.
- low heat hot glue gun & lots of glue sticks – low heat is key otherwise the heat will pop the balloons. You’ll use this to make balloon clusters before you mount them on the wire.
– What to do –
- decide on a color scheme. This is probably the most fun part! I went with rainbow for my party but honestly these look good any color. Monochromatic, a few colors, whatever you want!
- blow up the balloons a day or so before – with help! I had my mom, mother-in-law and sister-in-law + 2 air pumps to help and we knocked them out in a couple hours. This was honestly the hardest and most tiring part.
- attach the poultry wire where you want the garland. I just used the gaffers tape to mount it to a stucco wall and it worked fine, but you can nail it to the wall or use hooks like these if you’re concerned about it falling. Be careful when handling the wire, it’s sharp!
- using the low heat glue gun, create clusters with the balloons before you attach them to the wire. This helps save time and makes it so you don’t have any gaps that are hard to fill. I didn’t do as many as I should have because I was working against the clock but the parts I did do this way look a lot better.
- attach the balloons/clusters with gaffers tape. This was a bit of trial and error and I had a few balloons that flew off or popped. Luckily I had plenty of extra balloons to fill in when needed.
- Fill in any holes with extra balloons, that’s it!
Sadly I didn’t take any pictures as I was going because I was worried about running out of time, but I have lots when it was up!
