A LUAU PARTY

The night before the party, the birthday girl and I made the big tropical balloon garland.  It was super easy, fun, and really could be done with a variety of colors.  To start you will need:

• Small twine or string to attach the balloons and florals to.
• Balloons.  We bought 12 inch and 9 inch in three colors for a variety.
• Craft paper.  We hand-cut giant pink leaves and folded them here and there to give them dimension.
• Plant greenery. We bough two kinds: 1 large fern bush+large palm leaves in a package.  we found ours at Joanne fabrics with a coupon.
• Flowers
• Large and small clothespins to attach the florals, leaves, and craft paper leaves to the garland.

To start assembling the garland, we blew up tons of balloons.  We gave each of them different amounts of air, so they were all different sizes.  We cut a large piece of our twine to size. We measured where we would hang it, and then gave ourselves a little extra.  Then, one by one, we tied the balloons onto the garland.  This was a little tedious as we had to string the long twine all the way through each knot, but it was easy to get the hang of it. 

The closer we tied the balloons, the fuller the garland, and vice versa.  We mostly stacked our balloons almost right next to each other.

After this was done, we hung the garland into place by tying it to our pendant lights.  Then with the clothespins, we attached all of the flowers, hand-cut craft paper leaves, and greenery from the store.  I used the glue gun to attached some of the flower to the leaves first, and then pinned them to the garland.  After a little rearranging and adjusting, voila! We made a fun tropical floral garland.

We had so much fun at the party!  I loved watching London teach all her friends a hula that she made up.  'Yes, just feel the music' and 'like the waves of the ocean.'  And probably my favorite thing was watching Finnegan do the haka with his face painted and all!  I just love these kiddos.  Happy Birthday beautiful Londy girl!