Finding ideas for decorating a garden for a "Twinkle, twinkle little star" party is quite a challenge. Other people had had star themed parties but nearly everything I read involved fairy lights and the assumption that it could be dark when of course our party was taking part during broad daylight!
I decided we had to have bunting to cover our 22 metre of fence and was quite fixated for a while on finding parcel paper that was white as that was the kind of texture I wanted. In the end I came up with wallpaper lining which was nice and cheap. I was going to apply stars to it by cutting a star shape into a sponge but that wasn't very successful, just looked like a splodge instead of a star. So I experimented with potato printing and hey presto, we had bunting!
The other decorations didn't get photographed and I could kick myself about this because I spent a long time on them, the pinwheel windmills especially. I bought some hot pink and purple A4 card and cut each one into a square then glued it to foil and then cut the corners inwards to make pinwheels pinned onto bamboo canes. It was a very windy day and one or two did not survive! But they were very useful for providing directions, bringing people in from the front of the house and showing them where the drinks fridge was, just by masking labelled arrows to the bamboos.
We laid out all the food indoors in our dinning room which I was keen to have a little decoration. So I bought a piece of white organza with silver glittery stars on it for a table cloth (our house is now covered in glitter!)
I also collected about 20 glass jars and bottles in the weeks leading up to the party. I soaked them and applied white spirit to get the labels and glue off them. I tied different types of ribbon around some of them. Then on the damp afternoon before the party I pushed the pram along the river and collected different wild flowers and grasses. Together with lavender, roses and buddleia from our garden I arranged them in the jars and spread them across the window of the dining room. My mum said it looked like a fairy might pop out!
Here's the fireplace. I collected fir cones and stuck them in the airing cupboard in a paperbag for a couple of days to dry them and open them out. The orange slices I dried my self over several evenings in the oven on a low heat. I also added cinamon sticks to the bowl to create that lovely seasonal smell. The penguin and snowman are also in their second year and were a real bargain from our £1 shop.
