DIY Cake Toppers and Birthday Banners

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Inside: Make your own simple birthday cake toppers using sparkly scrapbook supplies and balsa wood. 

Sometimes you find yourself in need of fast and easy birthday decorations. When I found out I was hosting my niece’s 7th birthday the day before – I raced out to get a pretty pre-made cake and then decided to dress it up with some fun DIY Cake Toppers. 

If you are looking for a couple other quick and easy cake ideas, try these homemade Hostess-inspired stuffed cupcakes – so delicious!

Here’s how I pulled it all together!

Supplies for DIY Birthday Cake Toppers and Banner 

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• Scrap Balsa Wood
• Shiny Contact Paper
• Paint Pot Sample
• Little coloured paper bags
• Jute Twine
• Colourful Drinking Straws
• Glittery Cardstock
• Washi Tape

I also used my Silhouette Cameo for this project, but you can easily do this by hand with scissors. 

For the banner, I simply cut my Balsa into 4″ triangles using my utility knife. I love working with balsa wood for crafting because it cuts really well. Just a couple of swipes with the knife and it’ll come apart.

From there, I thought just sticking letters on my banner was too boring. I raided my paint stash and found some teal mis-tint paint that I used to colour the edges. 

I headed over to my Silhouette and typed Happy Birthday. Using my blade on setting 1, I cut it out of my silver shiny Con-tact Paper. But even that wasn’t enough fun for my banner yet! I bumped it up a notch with some black and white polka dot Washi tape first 🙂

The next thing I did was cut Princess Stars out of my Glittery Cardstock. Now – a warning. The settings in the Silhouette Studio suggested a blade speed of 3 and a blade depth of 6. But that didn’t cut through my super thick paper. Instead, I dropped the speed down to 2 (you’ll feel like your machine is taking FOREVER!!) and I increased the blade depth all the way to 10. Like butter. It worked perfectly. I hot glued my stars to my pink straws to create seven cake toppers for the 7-year old 🙂

The last step was to create the custom loot bags. I created a sort of Yankee swap for our family and filled each bag with gag gifts tailored to each person – so I decided to number them so I could make sure each person got the right funny present. (Wouldn’t want my Mother-in-Law getting the Poop emoji key chain when that was clearly for my 10-year old nephew! haha) I made the numbers out of the same shiny Con-Tact Paper that I used for the banner.

Now for the party! I staged them all together on a little table I brought into the living room.

And surprise, surprise! I ran out of time to bake a cake and decorate it, so this one is from the local grocer. Don’t you think the little star toppers gave it some new game? The only hiccup was that I couldn’t safely remove the cake from the plastic tray it came on, so I simple sprinkled some tissue confetti around and disguised it.

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