My Experience and Tips for Building a Balloon Arch

My daughter recently celebrated her 13th birthday, and after hearing about a friend who had assembled a balloon arch for a birthday party, I decided to tackle it myself! Balloon arches are an economical way to decorate for special occasions, and using a balloon arch kit is easier than you would think.

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I ordered a kit on Amazon. There are so many different choices, so I searched by color theme. In this case, I chose rose gold. The kit came in a little bag — you would never know this would create a giant arch!

My kit was a set of about 150 balloons, which came with a clear 16′ strip of plastic, and glue dots.

That is all you need, unless you use a solid arch to hang the balloons on or if you need to secure the balloon arch to something. You can also buy balloon arch stands on Amazon, which are either a full circle on a stand or a half circle that attaches to a table or the ground.

The other supplies I used were:

~ electric compressor / inflater (there are a variety of inflating devices out there)
~ string or curling ribbon
~ a way to secure it to your wall (I used three push pins)

Starting with the plastic strip, you inflate the balloons and insert them into the strip.

We worked as a team to inflate the balloons and get them in the strip.

Using the air compressor made this a million times easier. There is no way you can blow these up otherwise! My fingers did hurt after tying dozens and dozens of balloons, though.

After we had a decent amount of balloons blown up and inserted into the plastic strip, we added on accent balloons (which were smaller) with the balloon glue.

I didn’t actually use all of the balloons provided, and I cut the strip to fit an arch that we have in our house. I secured the plastic strip to our arch with a few push pins, and that was perfectly sufficient.

There are so many neat options for balloon arches, I highly recommend it! While I try not to use single-use decor, we carefully popped all the balloons and disposed of them carefully, and it felt like fairly minimal waste for such a large decoration.