Water Balloons Hung with Static from My Head for My Birthday Party Dinner

For my birthday party dinner last Saturday,

I bought a bunch of water balloons

and a hand pump.

(Have you ever blown up water balloons with your mouth?

It gets painful quickly.)

One of the balloons popped,

but I managed to get 49 of them tied up

and on the wall.

(I feel compelled to count that there are 49 of them

in the photo

because if this were a book that I was working on,

I'd have to count them.

But I'm going to just say that the package said 50,

and one popped, so there are 49.)

At first I wasn't sure how I'd use them to decorate.

And they got unwieldy pretty quickly,

so I started rubbing them on my head and sticking them to our

Modernist Cuisine case.

I asked Jon if he thought the balloons

would stay up on the wall

with static electricity alone.

I hadn't put up balloons with static in awhile,

and the Internet was no help at all

unless you want to make a science project out of it.

Jon had no idea

that balloons would even stick to the wall at all.

It's like he's never seen it.

So I grabbed a balloon,

rubbed it on his head,

and stuck it to the wall.

It was like magic.

I thought that even if they did fall,

the effort of putting them back up--

rubbing it on one's head--

wasn't that much of a big deal,

so I put them all up.

And they looked nice.

And they matched my invitation

that I made,

which had a lot of colorful polka dots.

I also broke out some glow-stick bracelets 

and napkins with colorful

circles on it to further match my invitation.

Tying it all into the theme.

Static electricity kept these water balloons up

the entire night.

The next day I found one balloon

on the floor that had

just totally deflated.

I recommend trying this

the next time you need some fast, easy, cheap decorations

and have some wall space to spare.

Though I don't think it would work as well with full-size balloons.

Parrrrrrrtttttttttyyyyy!