This post contains affiliate links and product provided by Oriental Trading. As always, I’d never promote a product I don’t already totally love! Check out my full disclosure and policies here.

Today’s post is SUCH an exciting one for me! Not only is it a party DIY which, you know I love, but it’s an announcement for our family! Let me explain what the DIY is all about before I share our news, okay?

This DIY is a morse code party garland plus you bet I have a hand lettered printable decoder for you. Yep, you heard me right! MORSE CODE! Haha, that means that you can hide any secret message you like in your party decorations. How rad is that?! A few years ago I made a similar (although much smaller!) garland for my kids room that says ‘Love You’ and have always wanted to use the idea for something else.

Want to know what we hid in our garland? If you caught our announcement a while back… we’re expecting our fourth babe (woohoo!) and for the first time we decided to find out if we’re having a boy or a girl! So now I’m not going to tell you the answer… you can figure it out yourself ;) HOW? Well, here’s the instructions I gave our family (we invited them over for a BBQ to share the news): Take your decoder and start looking for patterns. One color is the dots, one color is the dashes, and one color is to distinctly separate the letters.

I’ll wait…

Figure it out? ;) We are so excited! We have never found out gender of our babies in the past. We figured since we expect this to be our last- we’d give it a try this time around- plus sharing that news with the kids was so much fun. They can now always talk about their baby brother that’s in mommy’s tummy.

Okay, enough games… let’s get to the details on how you can make your very own to hide your secrets!

The first thing you’ll want to do is figure out your phrase and how many balls you’ll need in each color. You can grab my printable decoder to help you out.

GRAB THE PRINTABLE DECODER

I used honeycomb party balls from Oriental Trading (they have every. color. Ever!) and mixed up the style. I think I’d love to try this with the tiniest ones I could find and write a longer message… wouldn’t that be fun? The exact ones I chose are:

• Black Party Balls
• White Party Balls
• Mint with Tassels

I really didn’t want to go with the standard blue/pink theme for this- the colors here are so much more suited to us! If you wanted to go with a classic gender reveal party- they have tons for that too. Plus, we didn’t tell our family what they were coming over for (we have BBQs often) so this wasn’t an obvious gender reveal even once they got there.

Alright so for the making the garland… it’s pretty simple! My friend Kristin helped me make this but we also had some mini helpers. Start by assembling all the party balls! This part goes nice and quickly.

If your tissue balls are all the same size, you could just thread them onto a string after assembling and hang them like any other garland. Since we chose different shapes/sizes for ours, We hung them taught and used bits of washi tape to secure them spaced nicely.

Even though they’re tissue paper, they’re sure heavy. You could use nails to hold them up OR you could use clear hooks. I use these ones for my garlands and they always always hold. Just don’t try tape… you’ll be disappointed ;)

Then, make sure you have enough decoders printed out for your guests!

Psst… if you look really closely, you’ll see that I forgot to clean up the diggers under our table. *sigh*

But we did remember to grab some new family photos of the day! The kids were so excited to tell the secret they’d been keeping! And honestly… I’m SO impressed that they managed to keep a secret at 3 years old. We told them it was ‘saving a surprise’ instead of a secret… because we’re trying to teach secrets aren’t good ;)

There are SO many different things that you could do with a secret message garland… I’d love to hear what message you’d hide in there!

LIKE IT? PIN IT!