A Fiesta Themed Birthday Party

A part of my job that I love doing is making sets and getting the opportunity to get crafty. People come to me with so many themes that I never really get bored of what I’m doing. Recently I had a family tell me they wanted to do a Fiesta themed birthday session. Something I had never done before.

I set off to Pinterest to gather a ton of ideas on the cake, cake topper, background and any other little bits and pieces I should add in.

My list included:

Fiesta colored balloons
A GIANT taco
A GIANT piñata
Streamers
1 “uno” cake topper with little tacos on it
Fiesta themed cake

Quite the list. Now I realize I could just go and buy a lot of this from Target but that is simply just not my style. I love a good craft project and always jump to making something before I buy it. I placed a huge order at Michaels for tissue paper, balloons, poster board and lots of extra hot glue. I already have a huge amount of scrap book paper… like an unhealthy amount so the cake banner was already taken care of.

I started with the piñata.

I laid out two pieces of white poster board and drew what I thought was a pretty good looking piñata shape and cut it out on both pieces. Then I measured out how thick the middle should be, I said 5 inches, and cut several strips of that. Once I had them ready to go, I took tape and tapped together all sides of the piñata to make a base that I could glue the tissue paper to.

When I started this project, I expected it to take a very small amount of time. Maybe an hour tops. Turns out it was more like 4-5. After cutting all the tissue paper into strips and adding fringe and then gluing it on, a ton of time passed. Luckily, I had a lot of movies to watch on Netflix while I got it all put together.

Next It was the giant tacos turn. A much easier project that took maybe 20 minutes.

I took brown poster board and cut it into a hard taco shell shape. Added a 5 inch middle section and tapped them all together. Then I took tissue paper in the colors of things that would be inside a taco and added it around the outsides. I could have spent more time on the taco and made it way cooler but I think the prior project took a lot of my energy away that day.

Next was the cake and cake banner. I used a vanilla cake with vanilla frosting colored with different fiesta colors. Unfortunately all I could find in my cake drawer were my neon colors but I think it worked pretty ok. For the banner, I popped it into my Cricut and cut out a simple flag with some letters. The taco pieces are cut by hand.

It was a full day of work but I think the final results were worth it! And I hear from the family that the cake was quite tasty too! Can’t wait to see what new projects will come my way soon!