How to Decorate with Ten Balloons

As I was grocery shopping today, I was hoping to find something to help me spruce up the house for our February ladies' meeting tonight. Of course, the theme was Valentine's Day and all Valentine's Day merchandise was 50% off today.

I just couldn't bring myself to buy any of the valentine-theme plates or napkins that I found because I thought they were so horribly ugly. I'm definitely not into the child-scribbled-art thing. So I bought some red plates and cups from Dollar Tree to supplement the valentine napkins a friend had purchased last year.

I still needed something to decorate with, so I decided to pick up a package of ten balloons for $0.50. They weren't quite so bad in design since they only had one heart on them instead of the fifteen zillion overlapping hearts on the tableware.

I got them home, blew up all ten balloons by myself and then tried to figure out what in the world I was going to do with them. I knew Meredith would have come up with something fantastic, and I tried to think about what she might do with them. (She's my hero when it comes to table decoration and food presentation.)

Let me tell you, it was hard. I tried taping them to several surfaces, but the tape didn't want to hold. I tried laying them on several surfaces, but you know what happened - they blew off as soon as I walked past them.

Since I didn't have a huge arrangement of flowers to work with, I wanted to make something similar with the balloons. So I had the brainy idea of taping them to straws to keep them upright. That worked pretty well, but I still had to work with them a bit to make them stand upright in this vase.

It took me awhile, but I did like the end result.

I still had seven balloons leftover and plenty of space to decorate yet, so I decided to go for the biggest impact and attach them to my chandelier. After I added some curling ribbon and Kleenex roses, I was pretty pleased with it, too.