DIY New Year's Eve Party Poppers

Dec 30, 2016
2 min read

So, you decide to have a New Years party but you don't have anyone to watch the kids plus ringing in the new year with them will be a great memory. These DIY party poppers are super fun and easy to make. Most importantly the kids (and adults) will have a blast popping and refilling them again and again. Hours (or at least minutes) of entertainment!

You will need:

empty toilet paper rolls (or other similar cardboard tubes)
a few good quality balloons
scissors
craft glue and some sparkly embellishments
your choice of small and light weight fillers (see below for suggestions)

The first step is to gather your cardboard rolls, balloons and scissors. You can make your own party popper with just these three items.

Next, tie the end of the balloon in a knot and cut a very small section off the other end.

Then stretch the cut section over the end of your roll. Some balloons might split at this point, so it’s good to have a few spare. I found that the lower quality / old balloons from my stash split really easily, whereas the higher quality balloons worked much better.

Now for fun part, time to decorate! The possibilities are absolutely endless. I used glitter, scrapbook paper, sequins and sparkly puffy paint to jazz these babies up.

I tried out a few different filler options:

cut sections of sparkly pipe cleaner was my favorite of the fillers I tried. They are really light weight, so the party poppers could shoot them a long way, and they are big enough to make them easy to pick up to refill (or clean up afterwards).
little sequins work well, especially when combined with the glitter and cut pipe cleaners.
tiny sparkly pom-poms sound good in theory. They did work, but they were slightly disappointing. They tended to get caught in the bottom of the balloon knot bit.
I didn’t try confetti but I think this would work well too. I’ve seen metallic sparkly confetti for sale at craft shops that looks like it would be perfect for this sort of thing.