Giant Balloon Flowers

I have a quick and easy party decor tutorial for you today - mostly because I want to remember the process we figured out if I ever need it again :)
Kaitlyn's class did a very short play for part of their end of the year awards program in their classroom.  Her teacher wanted some giant flowers for the "set" (the play was about insects/collecting pollen) and Kaitlyn volunteered me to help out.  Not that I minded.  The teacher probably had no idea what she was getting herself into :)  She wanted a certain amount of flowers, 2 of each color and let me run with the rest of the plans.

Of course I recruited the husband to build the stands.  We did them completely out of scrap wood, painted them green and added big paper leaves.  That was our first installment.  We took these to the school the week before the play so the kids could practice with them. 

Then two days before the play we blew up all the balloons and I put together the flowers.  Thank goodness for husbands and power tools - the air compressor made relatively short work of this big task.

The idea I had been looking at online suggested tying the ends together to form the flower but they didn't keep their shape that way.  So I took discarded cardboard from cereal boxes, etc, cut it into circles (about 6" diameter), then cut 5 slits into the sides and slid the ends of the balloons into the slits.  I punched a hole in the center for the center balloon, then covered all the ends with tape to make sure they stayed in place.

Ta-da!  Giant three foot wide flowers made of balloons.
We carted them all to school (thank goodness I took the stands in earlier as the balloons filled the entire vehicle and I had to recruit helpers from her class to carry them all into the school) and I attached the cardboard to the stands with push pins.

Their little play was a big success.  Kaitlyn had one of the larger speaking parts and did a fantastic job as did the rest of her class.