How to Make a Stunning Hot Air Balloon Gift | Tutorial

Beautiful, unique, inexpensive to make and conveys a message: creating a money gift as a hot air balloon is a brilliant idea that is easy to make yourself with a good tutorial. This is how you make your hot air balloon gift an eye-catcher.

The bride and groom stand in a sea of flowers in the balloon basket, floating in happiness. A white hot air balloon, decorated with colourful flags and banknotes, carries them into the future. What a magical wish-fulfiller. I have to say, when I put our money gift on the gift table on a friends’ wedding day, I was very pleased with our wedding gift and it went down super well. It’s undeniably eye-catching and we made it so that the wedding couple can hang the hot air balloon on the balcony as a solar lantern and our gift is a keepsake from the wedding.

If you’re looking for an awesome idea to wrap your money gift, it’s worth reading on. Everything you need to make a hot air balloon gift and how to make it, I’ll tell you here!

Looking for more ideas for wedding games and nice surprises and gifts for the bride and groom? From DIY instructions for a heart piñata, to a special treasure hunt as a wedding game, to lots of beautiful wedding ideas, you’ll find what you’re looking for on our blog. Let us inspire you!

Material List

• Lantern with Ø 30-35 cm or a solar lantern
• 4 beautiful paper straws
• 4 skewers
• Woven flower pot as a basket with a diameter of about 10 cm
• Macramé yarn or jute cord, approx. 4.10 m
• Washitape
• Small artificial roses or flowers
• Banknotes (you need 20)
• Filling material e.g. black and white paper scraps or polystyrene balls
• Small glass bottle
• Message or greeting card
• Bride and groom
• Hot glue gun
• Scissors
• Sellotape

Tip: Alternatively, you can fill the basket with foam and put artificial flowers in it.

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How to Make the Hot Air Balloon Gift

Attach the Basket to the Lantern

Insert the shish kebab skewers evenly spaced inside the wickerwork of the flower planter and glue them in place with the hot glue gun. Now stick the straws on top and glue them about 1 cm inside the basket and 6.5 cm outside the inner circle of the lantern. Then glue the paper roses to the end of the wire all around as a border around the basket of the hot air balloon and bend the roses into the desired position and cover the glue spots on the straws.

Make a Pennant Garland With Banknotes

Measure about 4.10m of the macramé yarn and make a pennant garland with the washi tape. Fold the tape once over the macramé yarn and cut out a jag in the middle to create the pennant shape. It doesn’t matter if it’s not quite even! Now take the next washitape and make the next little pennant 4 cm further on. After 4 pennants with different Washitape, add a banknote to the pennant chain every 4 cm. This makes a total of 20 perfect banknotes.

Fold the notes in like an accordion and tie them in the middle of the pennant garland. Pull the accordion open on both sides and fix it in the middle with a small strip of Sellotape to make nice round rosettes.

Wrap the Pennant Garland Around the Hot Air Balloon

Wrap the garland loosely around the hot air balloon and glue it to the lantern with the hot glue gun. In our case, our hot air balloon money gift had to survive 800 km of transport and I therefore glued the pennant garland and the basket to the balloon very generously. If you use a solar lantern like we did, make sure that the solar module on top of the lantern remains free, as it has to catch the sun. 🙂

Fill the Basket

Fill the basket for your hot air balloon money gift with filling material, you can use whatever you like. I used black and white paper chips that were in a packet as wrapping material.

Position the wedding couple so that the foot is covered and the figure stands well.

I added a small glass bottle rolled up and with a message in the basket to the bride and groom. Inside was a poem personally written for the wedding couple and all the co-givers signed underneath.

Hot Air Balloon Gift for a Wedding, Birth or Anniversary

We gave our hot air balloon money gift as a joint wedding gift. At least 100 Euros should be attached to the hot air balloon. There is no upper limit :-). In the basket, we put a figure of the bride and groom and a personal message signed by everyone in a small glass bottle.

It is just as suitable as a gift for a birth with a cuddly toy, dummy and bottle or the family with baby in the basket. For this, I would design the hot air balloon money gift with bows on the balloon instead of flags so that the balloon can be used as a cute lamp for the baby’s room.

For a birthday present, personalise the contents of the basket to suit the occasion and the recipient. You can fill it with funny products that make fun of old age, such as an artificial set of teeth, mummy stop, come down and lucky tin medicine or a travel voucher and products that go with the trip, etc.

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Looking for more unique wedding gift ideas? Be sure to check out our wedding reception ideas, such as creating a wedding guest book, the tradition of cutting out a wedding heart or even wedding sketches.

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