Cocktail Drink Umbrella DIY: Hanging Ball Decoration

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At least 10 years ago my mom gave me a box of those mini cocktail drink umbrellas.  Up until the beginning of this project, that box of cocktail umbrellas had never been opened! Hubby’s birthday is coming up next month, so I’ve been thinking of fun crafty ways to incorporate the umbrellas into his party theme.  I came up with this cocktail umbrella craft for a hanging decoration.

This fun tropical-themed craft features a geometric arrangement of the mini umbrellas around a small styrofoam ball.  It’s a fairly easy craft to complete, although those of you who are perfectionists might find arranging the cocktail umbrellas perfectly takes a few tries.  If this tutorial doesn’t answer all your questions, let me know in the comments!

This cocktail umbrella craft requires:

  • a small Styrofoam ball (the bigger the ball, the bigger the decoration will be.  Mine was around 3″)
  • a pack of mini cocktail umbrellas (For my 3″ ball, I used somewhere between 30-35  little umbrellas)
  • a string or some way of tying the final product up

And here’s how I made the tiny drink umbrella ball:

This decorative craft is super simple to make.  Basically, just start sticking opened umbrellas into the Styrofoam ball. Make sure the ball isn’t too firm or it will be difficult to stick the umbrellas in. Leave enough room for the umbrellas to just overlap a few millimeters. I found that having one central umbrella and then surrounding it with 6 other umbrellas gave the prettiest design for my size of ball.


Continue sticking in umbrellas until the ball is completely full of them! You might have to readjust some of the earlier ones to get a full ball with no overlaps.  Unless you measure, do some math, and plan things out beforehand, you will probably end up readjusting some as well.

Lastly, tie a string on the ball and hang from the ceiling!  I used a small, lightweight string.

If your styrofoam ball is just humongous, the cocktail umbrella decoration might be a bit too heavy to hang.  In that case, just place a little bit of glue into the base of the umbrella you’re hanging the string from to secure things a little more.   I had no problems with my decoration hanging.


What a fun, tropical decoration!  Super easy and not time consuming at all to make!  Once hubby has his birthday, I’ll update with more details of how I used this decoration at his party.

Edit:  And here it is at his ’30 and still cool’ snow cone party!

Cocktail Umbrella DIY

2 Comments

  1. Deja Blank Craig says:

    I love this so much. What was the diameter of the ball and about how many umbrellas were needed?

    1. Sorry for the late reply! I used a 3″ diameter styrofoam ball, and it took somewhere around 30-35 little umbrellas.

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