Cheap DIY party centerpieces

My grandmother recently celebrated her 80th birthday.  Eighty years is a pretty big accomplishment.  Definitely worthy of an extra special celebration, so my family decided it was a great time for a surprise party. 

I’ve seen the most amazing, gorgeous party decorations all over Pinterest.  I was all set to recreate some of those fantastic decorations, when I suddenly remembered a few things: I don’t have hundreds of dollars to spend on decorations for one party.  And I don’t have hundreds of hours to spend on decorations for one party.

There were also some other real life limitations.  The party was being held in the church gym – a pretty big room – and I would need to decorate ten tables for people to sit at.  Which means whatever easy and cheap thing I came up with had to make an impact.  Anything subtle was out of the question. 



I decided tissue paper flowers were the way to go.  The bright colors made a huge impact in the room even though the actual centerpieces were pretty small.  I already had some colorful tissue paper on hand but you can get packs of multicolor tissue paper at the Dollar Tree. One buck for forty sheets of tissue paper – you can’t really beat that price. For the stems you can use green pipe cleaners, but I decided to use floral picks instead.  They are basically green wooden sticks with wire wrapped around them to attach the flower with and are much sturdier than pipe cleaners.  You can pick these up in the fake flower aisle at Walmart.  They are three bucks for around 50 picks.  If you have never made tissue paper flowers before, you can find a good tutorial here.

We decided to use aqua Mason jars we already had on hand as the vases.  If you don’t already have a stash of Mason jars though, you can pick up a dozen pretty cheaply at Walmart.  Or if you have a little more time and motivation, vintage ones are pretty easy to find at yard sales. 



The pop of color was just the thing that was needed in the large space.  But it still needed a little more.  So I used a circle punch and some card stock to make oversized confetti to sprinkle around.  I also made photo confetti to make it all a little more personal.  After gathering photos of my grandmother from throughout her life, I shrunk them down and photocopied them onto cardstock.  A little more circle punch action and we had photo confetti.



So there you have it, super cheap, meaningful party centerpieces.  The great thing is that these could totally work for pretty much any occasion from birthdays to graduation or anniversary parties.