DIY Garden Festival

How to create your own festival at home

Discover how Avery products, our free Design & Print online designer and a little imagination can help you turn your back garden into a fabulous festival!

Say goodbye to hours of traffic jams and smelly toilet queues - here are some ideas on how you can bring that festival vibe to your own home!

A festival theme can be brought to life with very little effort; and Avery products, our free Design & Print label creator and our friends at ID&C can help with those finishing touches!

Avery colleague Sarah recently threw a surprise 40th party for her friend and here she shows you how she turned her back garden into Katefest with a little help form our personalised labels and stickers!

First, we needed a theme!

Kate's friends and family wanted to create something special to celebrate her birthday and as she turned 40 in August, we agreed a garden festival was just the thing... and the idea for Katefest was born!

Working for Avery gives me access to the best contacts and I got in touch with our wonderful friends at ID&C to see if they could help with the festival branding. ID&C are festival experts, with over 25 years of supplying festival wristbands all over the world. Designing the bands on their site was super easy - and they had so many fantastic designs and themes to choose from. With Covid stopping most of us travelling this summer, I thought it best to bring the Tropical to Woodley, so went for a lush, leafy look.

I was then able to match this theme across my lanyards and festival passes. The friendly team at ID&C were so helpful and my festival packs were delivered within the week!

Defining Festival Areas

The Katefest Planning Committee (aka a couple of a friends and I over a glass of wine) created a site map of the garden - so we knew what items we would need to get hold of and what signage and labels we needed to decorate it.

We decided to divide the garden into areas: A seating circle, a food & drink tent, a games area (Giant jenga and swingball), a Hammock Haven, a tattoo parlour (transfers!), a candy floss station, a glitter bar and cocktail table.

Once we had the areas defined we then sent a message to all the invitees for donations of bunting, lanterns, inflatables, light boxes and balloons. Over the next few days, party decor started piling up and all that was left was to mow the lawn and sweep the patio ready for festival build up!

Avery Waterproof labels make great outdoor signage

Branding Katefest!

It was time to get printing! Now I had the Tropical festival theme, I used this imagery in the Avery free online label printing software: Design & Print. Avery Design & Print hosts every printable Avery product template, onto which you can add text and images and turn your blank sticky labels into beautiful signs and stickers!

First job: Signage. We needed to welcome visitors to the festival and point them through the garage to the garden (oh, the glamour!). I used Avery A4 Blank Labels to print "Katefest, this way" signs. When ordering I selected the Heavy Duty Waterproof Film option so they would both stick to bricks and be fine should it rain (after all, the party was planned for August in England...).

I used the same material on Avery 200x60 Blank Labels to decorate our repurposed fence post signs too. We placed these in flower pots around the garden (for decoration rather than necessary signage as the garden's not that big!)

Personalise your bottled gifts with Avery Labels

Branding Bubbles

One of the beautiful things Avery Design & Print can do is help you personalise presents for people. Our Fabric transfers can create bespoke clothing, pillow cases and bags and our labels can transform bottles and gifts.

We decided we would rebrand all the bottles brought to the party with Katefest labels so that everything looked uniform and fun. Kate loved her named bottles and even took a few of the empties home as keepsakes!

To make these bottle labels I used Avery 99x139 Blank Labels with Waterproof film. It's important not to use paper labels for this sort of labelling as any condensation or drips will make the ink run and possibly parts of the label come away. Our Waterproof film will make sure the print stays on beautifully and can be submerged in an ice bucket and still look great.

Avery clear labels help identify whose glass is whose

Naming Glasses

With lots of people at a party, it is easy to put your glass down and lose it. It's especially important, in the middle of a pandemic, not to get glasses mixed up so an easy way to avoid this is to name everyone's glass.

I threw together a very simple spreadsheet of all the guests' first names. Then, using Avery 40mm round labels in a clear film (code 40-RND), I used the Mail Merge feature inside Design & Print to import each name onto its own label. I then had a sheet of name labels, which was kept next to all the glasses. As a guest arrived, they picked their name from the sheet and attached it to their glass, so no-one supped from the wrong one!

The nice thing about these labels is that, after the party, they peeled off the glasses really easily, leaving no sticky residue, which made washing up a whole lot easier.

Finishing touches

To add finishing touches to the decorations, I printed lots and lots of Avery Tent Cards to put on the different tables and stations. These FSC certified cards can be printed on both sides. They are microperforated and are easy to pull apart and fold.

We had cards inviting people to pick up their festival pack, to label food and drink as well as various instructions.

We had made two personalised Kate-inspired cocktails for the party, which we named using these tent cards too.

Finally, it was time to open the (garage) doors to the party and welcome the guest of honour! It was such a lovely day and the garden looked so pretty. And best of all, it didn't rain a drop!