Little Mermaid Birthday Party Ideas & Inspiration - Crafty Party Girls (2024)

We threw a little mermaid birthday party for my niece’s 4th birthday. And, as always, I like to go crazy and make all my own homemade little mermaid decorations! I hope these under the sea mermaid birthday party ideas give you some inspiration to make your own decorations for your little mermaid themed party.

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Large mermaid posters for walls, printing and laminating them.

With any party, the FIRST thing I do is think about what BIG design element I want to do.I needed BIG mermaids to make this a legit mermaid birthday party.

It’s usually some BIG artsy crafty project that will cover a big wall!

For this party I decided to do my own large mermaid posters. Which means I printed, cut out and laminated them myself!

This was my main inspiration poster. It was the same inspiration as my sister had for her little mermaid cake.

I found this site that lets you make posters for free. ACTUAL for real FREE:: https://www.blockposters.com/

NOTES:

• You have to find high quality large pictures.
• This DOES use up a LOT of your printer ink.

The BIGGEST pain is that one poster prints out on several pages and you have to CUT it all out and TAPE it all together. AND then I laminated them and cut the edges of the lamination paper off too.

I started this a month before the party because this is time consuming!!

If you LOOK CLOSE at the poster below you can see the lines where I taped the pieces together. It still looked really good. I also used bling I bought at Walmart for the bubbles on the wall.

Below is the MAIN wall that I focus on at my sister’s house for the kids parties. This is where we end up putting the food and drinks at every party. I LOVE to try and fill the whole wall.

I printed all the posters and the fish on this wall AND I added bling around the mermaids’ waists and their crowns and used bling for bubbles.

NOTE: The blingy rhinestones looked great BUT they kept popping off the walls. So I would not do that again.

The Happy Birthday mermaid banner I got at amazon:

Laminating posters – To laminate the posters we bought a BIG roll of low temp laminating film. We just place some over the top of our posters and use the iron…. Be sure you iron on a towel because the glue from the laminate paper will stick to the towel, which is better than getting glue on your ironing board… I’ll make a video about this one day.

Paper coral decorations

I just used tissue and crepe paper for the coral along the food wall.

I started making these a month before the party too. I just looked up pictures of coral and played around with tissue and crepe paper.

Blinged out the posters and walls

I like to put decorations on ALL the walls. Which means I end up needing to make a LOT of decorations.

This is another wall. My sister already had the turtle picture. You can see bling on mermaid posters and bubbles. BUT again, they kept POPPING OFF the walls… So annoying.

My sister Chrissy already had this octopus. We just put some googly eyes on it. Also, I bought a couple packs of fish from amazon that I put ALL over the party and they looked great. It really made the whole room like an under the sea party and not just little mermaid.

I used a pack of fish that are printed on both sides. So I could hang them in the windows and from the ceiling.

I also used some fish that were ONLY printed on ONE side, so those worked on walls but not for hanging on windows or down from the ceiling where you end up seeing both sides.

Under the sea treasure chest

I used a couple of boxes that I already had. I was going to bling them out or add seashells etc. But I ran out of time.

So, I bought some treasures and a long strand of pearls, dollar store necklaces and cute mermaid necklaces I got on amazon. Then I just let the kids dig in and grab whatever treasure they wanted to.

NOTE: the kids didn’t really dig into this. I think because it was near other decorations and maybe they thought it was decor and not for them to play with. If I were to do it again, I would place this treasure trove somewhere it was clear for the kids to play with.

And I bought these pearls. (which I also used for bling chandelier over the cake table)

Bling chandeliers

What is a little girl party without BLING??? I just LOVE bling.

To make these party bling chandeliers, I bought three different strands of pearls and bling and then draped them from the ceiling fan above the Ariel cake table AND above the island in the kitchen.

I used 3 strands of bling that I got from Amazon for these chandeliers. I left them in long strands so after the party I could just wrap them back up for future parties!

Sea wave streamers

My sister’s house has a LOT of windows, so to give it the look that we were under the sea, I covered them all with these twisted streamers. NOTE: This can be done on regular walls too.

I alternated between two colors of light and dark blue. They were simple to do but a totally time consuming and annoying when some would fall. I taped them to the top of the window and then twisted them and taped to bottom of window.

They added IMMENSELY to the feel of the whole living room being under water. They were so cool that my sister left them up for weeks after the party. It wasn’t until they started naturally falling that I took them all down for her.

Under the sea mermaid silhouettes, turtle and fish

OMG I saw an example of this on Pinterest and I had to do it with mermaid silhouettes!

And it worked out perfectly because my sister’s backyard already had a blue sail shade over the back patio.

They turned out really cool, as you can see in the collage below. The only thing is that it was windy on the day of the party… and I couldn’t get them to stay put. But they looked good before they blew off LOL. (the wind was great for the bubble machine on the back patio though)

I printed these mermaid silhouettes out as posters and taped them all together and also laminated them. You can see in the bottom middle picture I had not yet cut the big mermaid lamination paper yet. That’s is the that really light square around her. I did cut her out before the party.

Balloons as bubbles on ceiling

I blew up about 100 clear balloons and hung them in bunches coming down from the ceiling to look like bubbles. Like we were all under the sea 🙂 I did bigger balloons at the top and made them smaller as they got lower. I hung them with clear string/fishing line.

You can kind of see them behind the bling chandelier below.

I also used colored balloons in various places.

Floating pearls in vase

This was something I tried for the first time. I was just curious, because I thought it LOOKED SO COOL in other peoples’ pictures.

I soaked the clear beads for several hours and put them in the vases. BUT they just KEPT and GROWING and GROWING. I had to keep removing clear beads from the vases and pushing the colored pearls farther down.

It looked super cool, but kind of a pain.

I got some little blue round chocolates that turned out cute. That’s what’s in the bowl by the vases in the picture below.

NOTE: The white and blue pearls were sooo pretty, but they did have small holes in them because they are for making necklaces. BUT it still looked really good. And we used the rest of the pearls around the base of Ariel cake.

I used clear pellets and white and blue pearls to float in them. It only takes a little, very little bit of clear beads. I still have a whole big bag of them. I’ll use them in another party:

Fish and Jellyfish out of dollar store bowls

We made these out of big bowls from the dollar store. We used some crepe paper for the fins of the fish.

In the background there is an umbrella that I covered with the purple plastic table runner to make it look a little like a giant jellyfish. I cut up some strips of plastic table cloths and hung them underneath it as the jellyfish’s tentacles.

Also I bought that watery looking background to help cover the wall in the backyard. I think I got it at party city. The little mermaid tablecloth and confetti in this picture I believe we got at Party City too.

The hanging jellyfish below are dollar store bowls!

We sprayed them with hairspray and covered them with that sort of clear shimmer glitter. We added some eyes and made the tentacles out of things we had like streamers, yarn, ribbons etc.

A lot of the decorations ended up in the bedroom and made for some cool artwork for a while.

Gift Bags

The gift bags we used were just plain purple and pink paper bags that I got at the Dollar Tree.

I got a pack of Ariel stickers from Party City and I let the birthday girl go to town with decorating the bags with the stickers! She thought it was great fun to decorate them and to put all the goodies in them.

Other misc items

We ended up buying some other miscellaneous items for the party.

The plates, napkins, outdoor little mermaid tablecloth, and little mermaid confetti were purchased at Party City. https://www.partycity.com/little-mermaid-party-supplies

This BIG Ariel balloon was a huge hit with the birthday girl. It is a giant Little Mermaid Airwalker that was 38” wide x 53” tall. We did have to go get it blown up with helium at Party City. This picture was taken at the end of the night. The birthday girl was completely worn out lol.

We bought these little mermaid and merman photo booths. It made cute pictures. It IS kinda small though so we put it on the table in backyard. You just have to take the pictures up close.

It’s only like 2 feet tall and 3 feet wide. But they only cost like $10 for the both of them, so I thought it was worth it.

I bought a BUBBLE MACHINE for the party! I was very excited about this. I’ve never had a bubble machine but have dreamed about it LOL.

I got it on Amazon and it worked great. It had a remote which came in handy. I kept the remote on me during the party and could turn on the bubbles when the kids were outside. And then turn it off when we were all inside the house.

I also bought a mermaid bling tattoo kit to tatoo kids during the party. I thought I would have time to put these on the kids but I was way TOO BUSY. But luckily there was a young girl at the party about 11 yrs old who jumped in and had a great time putting these sea creature tattoos on all the kids.

And of course THE CAKE!! You can check out how to make the cake on this blog post: https://craftypartygirls.com/little-mermaid-cake/