Rainbow Streamer Garland Tutorial

I've had a lot of people ask about the rainbow garland I made for the table backdrop at the 'Neon Rainbow' party, so I've written a quick tutorial.

As mentioned in my previous post about the party, I had a rough idea in my head about the look I wanted to create, but had no idea if would work until I started making it.

I started with a packet of 6 rolls of crepe paper streamers, which I cut into lengths of approx 1.4 metres.  I cut one length first then used it to measure the rest of them.

Next I grabbed a length of ribbon roughly 1.6 metres in length, which was the right width for the amount of streamers I had as well as the width of the wall space it would hang on.

I tied each end of the ribbon on my washing line, then started tieing the streamer lengths to the ribbon starting from the middle.  

Now, tieing paper streamers is not that easy.  In hindsight it may have been easier to make this out of ribbon lengths, but I already had the crepe paper streamers, and I haven't come across many neon colours of ribbon.  Depending on the colours you want to use for your own streamer garland, you may want to try this with ribbon.  And if you do, please let me know how you go.

I just tied a simple knot around the top of the ribbon, keeping it really loose so the paper didn't rip, but tight enough that it wasn't going anywhere.  To keep the appearance of the garland uniform, it's important to ensure all knots are facing the same way when you tie them, so they all have the small end sticking up to the same side.  Mine all stuck up to the right simply because that's the way I tied the first one, and did the others to match.

Continuing to tie the streamers from the middle out to the edges, the finished colours ran red, pink, yellow, green, blue, purple.

The garland needed some finessing, to space the streamers all out evenly along the ribbon so they had enough space and were on the right angles to sit flat.

All I did to hang it on the wall was stick a couple of 3M adhesive hooks to the wall with the recommended waiting time, then the garland was hung proudly on the wall.

The hardest part of the whole project was discouraging cheeky Miss 4 year old from running through the garland and pulling on it while I was making it!

If you have a go, please share your photos and feedback with me.

Neon rainbow party!

I'm sure you're curious about how we put together parties for our own kids, given we've now been catering for kids parties for 4 years now. So I thought I'd share some photos and details from my little girl's 4th birthday party with you.

Last weekend we celebrated my little girl's 4th birthday, with a 'neon rainbow' themed party. She wanted a rainbow theme for her party, and with neon / fluro being so on trend right now, we decided the rainbow should be neon!

Lots of very bright colours everywhere!

Aunty Dani made all the food, including pink iced cupcakes with neon edible glitter, and a pink gradient / ombre birthday cake. Miss 4 requested a 'rainbow' of pink for the inside of the cake, and wanted it to be banana flavoured. Dani thought it would be too intense if the whole cake was banana flavoured, so it was a traditional vanilla butter cake, with banana icing on the top, sides and in between each layer of cake. 

I made a cake topper to sit on top, with a rainbow coming out of a sparkly gold 'A'. The cake looked amazing when it was cut as you can see from the photos. It tasted fantastic too of course!

The cupcakes were vanilla butter cake as well, with vibrant pink icing which was dusted with amazing neon edible glitter that caught the light perfectly in real life, yet was hard to capture in photos.

The savoury food was all our usual favourites, petit pies, cocktail sausage rolls, mini hotdogs, veg samosas, and caramalised onion quiches.

Home made marshmallows were on the menu of course, this time they were vanilla bean marshmallow dusted in pink and purple sugar.

The kids also had a large bowl of orange quarters, and individual mini water bottles as it was a hot day.

We had 1kg of 'Happy Birthday' rainbow rock candy to fit with the theme. These were displayed in a glass jar, a glass bowl, and popped in cello bags in the take home party bags, along with fun brightly coloured sunglasses, neon giant balloons, neon slinkies and a few other little things.

The backdrop of the whole table was a garland I made the day before, using EXTREMELY neon crepe paper streamers. It was so bright it practically glows in the daylight! I had the idea for this in my head, but couldn't find any images or tutorials online about how to put it together, so I just made it up. It was really easy, so I'll try to put together a tutorial soon to share with everyone.

We had giant neon balloons as well, but unfortunately due to the heat outside, they popped when they went in the sunlight so we ended up with them all taking over our lounge room. I also found some neon pink round lanterns, so we hung them outside along the front of the shed. They looked so pretty I wanted to keep them up permanently but I think they colour would fade too fast if we did that.

It was great how easily this party theme came together, and surprisingly even with all the items I made it felt like very little effort was required on the actual day. I guess a lot of that is to do with having the food catered!

The birthday girl said she had a fun party, so looking back at all the photos I'm glad we put it together for her.

If you have any questions about where I got anything from, or how I made anything, please comment below and i'll let you know :)