My 30th Birthday – Part 3 (The Decorations)

Read Part 1 and Part 2 if you missed them!

I’m probably going to make all of you sick and tired of hearing about my 30th Birthday by the time I’m done blogging about it, so I will apologize in advance. This post is about one of the things that was really a lot of fun for me though – the decorations! While I definitely don’t do a lot of crafty things, I think it is something that is in my bones, because I had a blast doing them. I think one of the things that intimidates me the most is the pressure to “be creative”, but with Pinterest, I felt like everyone else did the creative thinking for me and all I had to do was copy them, which is totally fine with me! It was a little scary at times, tedious, messy, and required me to do some problem-solving and pull some strings to find crafty equipment (I don’t have much of any) – but in the end, it was all worth it! The decorations is also where I got to take my rainbow theme to the max.

Where to start? I think one of the definite favorites was the yarn balloons. After finding my initial inspiration, I went hunting on the Internet for tutorials and found that all of the instructions were slightly different & super vague on the ratio of glue to other stuff that you dip the yarn in, so this one was scary, because I wasn’t really sure it was going to actually turn out! My wonderful friend Lanney also came over to help out & in one of the tutorials I read, it told you to first wrap your balloon with the dry yarn to get an idea of how much you’d need – this was a BAD IDEA!!! After cutting our lengths of yarn, we spent HOURS trying to untangle it all – it would definitely be better to just wing it & pull the yarn directly from the ball. This was also the messiest craft I did, since I first covered my balloons with Vaseline before wrapping them in the wet & gluey yarn. But I LOVED the final product – they were so cute!

Combined with the yarn balloons was my circular paper garland. The tutorial mentioned that they used old second-hand books for some of their circles, so in addition to the solid colored rainbow circles I used, I cut up a colorfully illustrated kids book that my son had conveniently ripped to pieces – at least it wasn’t going completely to waste! I think I cut out around 300 circles – thanks to being able to borrow a special cutter from one of my mom’s friends & then using my mom’s sewing machine, sewed them all together to create the garland. I really liked how they turned out!

 

My next crafty decoration was some paper strip lanterns, which I sadly had to hang inside, because they didn’t like the wind so much. But they still looked cute hanging in our large front bay window and were quite easy to make.

Next, I made some paper strip mobiles, which were similar to the garland, just paper strips sewn together and hung up!

Lastly, I made some paper fan star/flower thingiesand these were probably the most tedious to make because of all the folding! I spent hours folding forty 8 1/2 x 11 sheets of paper and my pec and armpit muscles were sore the next day – lol. Also, I couldn’t actually find a tutorial anywhere on the Internet for how to make these, so I had to do some problem solving and figure it out on my own. I then had to finagle a heavy-duty stapler from my mom’s work place to put these things together, but the end result was quite fun and dramatic!

 

One more crafty item was a photo guest book which my mom and sister Nicole put together for me! There was about one photo for each of the 30 years of my life coupled with a pretty piece of scrap paper that guests could pull out and sign. It was fun for them to see old pictures of me and definitely a really fun keepsake for me to have afterwards!

 
 

All right – I think that about covers it! Stay tuned for Part 4…