Party Over Here>

Here you see the taller cluster of cheerful micro-scale balloons on set during the daytime, which may announce where the party will take place that night. Yo. (You may also notice that all the walls on the cottage are now white-washed and textured with chopped straw.)

These balloons were much more tricky to make than I imagined. I made many many attempts at it, shopping the aisles of craft shops for candidates that didn't work.

I needed them to be the right size, round, transparent, lightweight, and to have a handmade look. Miniature glass Christmas ornaments worked (used two of them out of the five) with the exception of their glass openings being more broad than I'd prefer. I camo'd that with twine and cloth skirts as much as I could.

The other three were made from a child's toy packaging that I bought for a dollar. Gave the toys (to a happy Aedon) and glued the two haves of the bubble they came in together. I had to layer them with clear glue to level out the toy's name on both halves and the seam in the middle. The seam was further camo'd with hand-painted stripes.

After the clear balls were wrapped and glued with hand-painted shiny silk-cellophane fabric, they were attached to painted strong wire that was then wrapped around clusters of rocks that can be hot-glued to the party set. The balloon strings were festooned with tiny ribbons and flowers to make them more party-like/festive as well as to hide the joins of the wire strands.

I like these as the last element for the party decorations because they add a nice height to the set for the flying bugs to be seen with.

I made an additional one, a nice new shiny red one wrapped around the middle of one of the worms who will be arriving with only his stomach kept aloft from it as he inches along.