Using the Cricut Explore Air for Birthday Party Decorations

Pool Party Birthday - Part 2

7/23/2017

Decorations and Thank You Cards

What is a party without decorations? Decorations bring excitement as to what is to come and festive feelings to your guests as they approach your party. I love to do decorations myself because I can really customize for: color, size, personalization and activities. I also hate wasting money on things that will be thrown away after a day. For creating decorations, I really put my Cricut Explore Air to work. Cricut Design Space allows me to customize what I want and see what it will look like. Using the Cricut Explore Air to cut out all the pieces saves me a lot of time and makes my decorations look professional.

Beach Ball Thank You Cards

Instead of mailing Thank You cards to my guests after the party, I decided that the easiest thing to do was to give them a thank you card during the party. The thank you cards would go into each goodie bag. In making the cards, I used the beach ball from the H2O Cartridge. I selected the bottom layer, made a duplicate of this, welded the two bottom layer balls together and added a score line in Cricut Design Space. For the Cricut Explore Air to score your card, you need to purchase the Cricut Scoring Tool. The height of the card base is 3.5". The top layer of the beach ball is 3.3" high. I then added: "Thank you for making our party" in Simple Celebrations font using the Jade Cricut Pen which is part of the Antiquity Pen Set. On the other side of the card: "Splash" from the H2O cartridge was written using Metallic Blue Cricut Pen from the Metallic Pen Set. I then cut out the card base in white cardstock and the top layer in both turquoise and orange cardstock to match the party colors. You can link to my project on Cricut Design Space here.

The Cricut Explore Air can write messages too! I had the machine write this and then had the kids sign their names.

Assembling the pieces takes time and organization. The Tombow Mono Dot adhesive keeps the tape where it needs to be which helps on small pieces.

When everything was done printing, I took them out of the mats, used a bone folder to fold the cards and taped on my beach ball layers using Tombow Mono Dots Adhesive. I like this adhesive because it is dry and comes out in dots so it only goes where you want it to go.
After assembling all the cards, I had the kids write their names on the cards and put them into each nylon goodie bag. I kept some extra to give to grandparents and family who would not be getting a goodie bag.

Decorations

I kept the decorations a bit simple because I knew the kids were going to be out on the water slide during the entire party. I used the same beach balls I had made for the cards (just not in card form) and adhered them to paper straws (I get these at Michael's or Target in the dollar area). I also used the H2O cartridge to cut out the word Splash, a life preserver and a wave and adhered them to paper straws. The number 6 is from TheLife's a Beach cartridge. I then put the straw decorations into plastic drinking cups that I had on hand. Floral foam in the bottom of the cup really helps to keep the straws upright and I added some stones to the bottom of the cups for stability. After the party, I then use these decorations on their scrapbook pages. You can link to my project on Cricut Design Space here.

Putting it together.

The party had an orange and turquoise color scheme. I purchased my party supplies from Oriental Trading: tablecloths, paper cups, napkins and plates. Typically I make the happy birthday banner, but this year I purchased it from Oriental Trading just to save time. If you are interested in seeing the favor bags, please link here. We rent the chairs and the Sno-cone machine which was a big hit. The cake was from a nut-free bakery as I like to make my parties nut free so parents don't have to worry that day. If you have any questions, please leave a comment or email me.

If you are interested in any of the supplies I've used, I have added links below and within the post. Some of the links are affiliate links which if you use them I may earn a commission at no cost to you. Thank you for your time today and I hope your birthday party is a huge success.