Decorating for a party without spending any money

 Last week my sister-in-law graduated from the university and we had a party for her. My younger sister and I were in charge of decorating. I think decorating is fun and I especially love the challenge of decorating while using what I already have on hand.

 My sister-in-law, Molly Bea, loves colorfulness more than any other person I know so we decided that a rainbow decorating theme would be in order.

   We even tried to make our food colorful - we had lemon bars, orange pumpkin bars, granola bars with blue sprinkles, brownies with red raspberry topping and a cake with a rainbow sing on top.

 We also had sandwiches on orange buns (made with squash), red ham, green sprouts, yellow potato salad, a colorful pasta salad, red punch and more. It was rather fun trying to think of all the ways we could make the meal colorful.

 I have seen various buntings made from fabric strips just tied onto a string. I decided to look through my t-shirt box (or t-shirts ready to be turned into something else) and see if I had rainbow colors. I did. Yeah!  I cut a long strip out of a knit shirt and then a bunch of strips around 10 inches long from the rainbow colored fabric. Then we tied them on according the colors sequence on a rainbow (red, orange, yellow, green, light blue, dark blue, violet). We did two strips of each shade and then we repeated the sequence over and over.

 I thought it ended up looking pretty cool and it made it seem very much like a party.

 Molly Bea also loves pin wheels and so we decided to use pinwheels for the table decorations. We made them out of construction paper and/or old wallpaper scraps (from those sample books). We put beads that were threaded on florists wire through the center and then attached them to some sticks that were in our craft cupboard (I don't know their original use).

 Keren made a really big one that ended up rather floppy so it got tacked onto the wall.

 Also on the tables I had cut out circles of various sizes from construction paper and other colored papers that I was able to reuse from another project and placed them onto the table.

  We enjoyed our simply, inexpensive and fun decorations. Keren had thought about getting balloons and flowers too but we decided it really wasn't necessary.

  Do you have any fun party decorating ideas that are inexpensive? I would love to hear!

Next week we will be decorating inexpensively for some friends' wedding. I will try to blog about that too.