The easy way to make a balloon arch for your party

Balloon arches can make a big impression at your party. But there's an easy way and a hard way to do them! I'll be honest, I've not really done the hard way, but I've heard from friends that they've battled for hours, and having just this weekend veered towards the hard way, I'm glad I found the easy way first! Some of my balloon arches are shown below... follow me on Insta if you want to see more as I do them!

The hard way involves string or tape and sticking balloons together with sticky balloon dots - the arch I made at the weekend needed a tiny bit of sticking (for the flowers - see below) and they were just constantly falling off. So the idea of having to stick the whole thing together just sounds like a nightmare. Meanwhile, if you haven't got anything to tie your string to to give it shape, you're going to need to fill the balloons with helium, adding a huge extra cost to the decorations budget. (And then you've got a huge canister to get rid of properly.)

So rather than battle with tape and (non)sticky dots (which do seem really sticky when you peel them off the backing... but then the balloons just keep falling down), I bought an arch kit. It's like a giant tent pole and it gives you a good base for your balloons. It cost me about £20, which is a cost you don't need if you use string or tape, but I've used it a lot of times now and one small canister of helium would cost more than that, and using the tent-pole frame means I can just blow them up with air.

You then buy packets of balloons designed for balloon arches, and they usually come with string or tape and dots, so you've got everything you need if you do do it the hard way. The packets of balloons I've bought have been £9 - £15 depending on how elaborate they are (tip that I found ahead of my son's 9th Birthday: don't search for Minecraft balloon arch kits, just get green ones! There will be an assortment of shades and it'll be much cheaper).

Below is the photo from Amazon of the flower balloon set (that's an affiliate link by the way, as are others for the products mentioned in this post) I bought, along with my finished version (which was just quickly thrown on the pole) - I think it works! Because I was using a firm, fixed arch I don't have them all kinda overspilling on one end like in the pro version, which does look very lovely - but I think that would take lots of dots and sticking and tying. You can also see the rest of my black frame where the balloons stop, but I don't think that's a problem, especially once people arrive and it's dark. To avoid helium, the little freestanding display on the right uses a £6.99 balloon stand kit I can reuse.

Back to the tent pole frame - it's one long stick that just slots in together with elastic running through it. Each end of the pole then sits over a stick on a base, which is weighted down with water. It's very easy to set up. I'm aware one day I might get a puncture in the plastic bag you fill with water but I'll just need to be careful. One thing I did find was that the balloon arch kit I have was advertised as being able to change size -so you could do a small arch or a big arch. But in reality, if you ever did a small arch you'd need to cut the elastic running through the poles and discard some of the poles - and good luck to you at getting that elastic back through the discarded poles if you ever wanted it long again. So yes, you could make it shorter (I'd intended to use it as a table top arch) but I think that would be a permanent change, so I've just kept mine long and luckily it fits in a good spot in our kitchen.

The arch kit then comes with little white discs you hook your balloons into and you just feed the pole through them. It takes me a couple of hours to blow up all the balloons (by hand - or rather mouth, I find it quicker than with a hand powered balloon pump but maybe I just don't have a very good one - and some are a bit small to bother with an electric air pump) and then honestly maybe 30 minutes to clip them onto the discs and feed them through? I've never done that bit alone to be honest, I normally have other people around getting ready for a party and we all just clip them on and feed them through. But I'm usually in a rush before guests arrive so I don't let it take very long.

I save big ones to go on the ends, but other than that I'm not too fussy about the overall decisions of which balloon goes where because once they're all on they look quite random and good. You can then twist them around so that any colours you want are on the front.

And there you have it! An easy-every-time eye catching balloon display that always gets compliments. I might actually be getting a little obsessed and may have got these other 2 ready for Halloween and Christmas, because I know the kids will go crazy for them and they're so quick and easy to do! (Affiliate links if you want them: Halloween arch kit | Christmas arch kit)