Bilbo Baggins’ Birthday pt. 2

Check out part one for more information about the tree! After the tree and ceiling pieces were done for the living room, the dining room seemed sad. I was on the lookout for another large decoration piece to incorporate, but was coming up empty. Until, I saw on facebook marketplace that someone local was giving away four big balloon arches that just so happened to look like fireworks. This sparked my imagination to allow the dining room to be the firework show where the dessert and food would be displayed. Surprisingly, I managed to fit all of the balloons in my suv without assistance or popping. Inside the house I didn’t have as good of luck. I ended up popping several of the balloons trying to untie them from their arch to fit my space. I also had difficulty with the balloons staying attached to my walls due to having textured walls. I used extra strong double sided tape, and put more pieces of tape than I thought were needed. I also ran across a string light display that could hang down from the balloons to add further lighting and help create the firework visual I was going for.

I added vines around the ceiling light to help it blend into the scenery a bit more. I also already owned a faux olive tree that I moved into the dining room to help add height and volume to the space by the cake table. We ended up using a spare table we had around the house for the cake/dessert table. I decorated it by adding metal trays, kraft paper to the top, and an old candle holder/lantern to add dimension and height. The leftover balloons migrated under the table and I liked the pop of color it added to that side of the room, so I left them!

I made sugar cookies from scratch to create my lembas bread. I used a square cookie cutter and a knife to score the actual lembas bread cookies, and then I used green food coloring and a leaf cookie cutter to create the lembas bread wrapping.