When my daughter asked for a camping birthday party, this candy station was one of the first things I designed! 🎉

I immediately got stuck on the idea of featuring colorful balloon letters and toy bugs in unexpected colors and ran with things from there… the result was a bright and playful indoor campout!

Colorful Camping Party Candy Buffet

Read on for full details on how to recreate this fun candy station at your own camping party. You can also find all of the camping party printables in my store!

BUG OUT! Backdrop

I spray-painted 16″ letter balloons for the candy table backdrop and hung them on mosquito net fabric. I absolutely love how bright & colorful this BUG OUT backdrop turned out!!

The balloon letters took 2-3 coats of spray paint each, and I only painted the front. If I did this design over again, I would attach little mosquitos or toy bugs all over the mosquito netting. It’s the one thing I feel like the backdrop is missing. 🤨🦟

Colorful Bugs

We definitely needed some bugs crawling around on this buffet! I bought some large toy bugs and painted them in colors that matched the party.

My daughter and her friend loved helping with these, which was definitely an added bonus! We used acrylic craft paint and started by giving them all a base coat of white before adding the bright colors.

Creative Candy Jars & Labels

I used the acrylic candy jars to hold the treats and decorated them with twine & printable labels from my Camp Out party collection. Candy is just candy until you give it a fun name! Using printables to label the sweets made all the difference here…

Even though bugs were a big part of the decor on this candy buffet, I used all different kinds of camping-themed words to come up with fun names for the sweets.

Here’s the full list of candies & names:

• Blue Gummy Bears = WILD BEARS
• Gummy Worms = FISHING BAIT
• Red & Yellow Rock Candy = CAMPFIRE FLAMES
• Banana Gummies = BANANA SLUGS
• White Sixlets = SPOTTED OWL EGGS
• Whoppers = BIG FOOT DOO-DOO (I misspelled this one at our party 😂)
• Pink Butter Mints = LADYBIRD BEETLES (a.k.a. LADYBUGS)
• Heart Shaped Marshmallows = LOVE BUGS
• Smarties = CATERPILLARS

These are just some initial ideas… you can serve your own favorite treats and edit the text on the labels to say anything you want!

Bug Jar Party Favors

There’s always leftover candy on candy buffets, so I added little acrylic “Bug Jars” that the guests could use to collect some treats to take home. These also doubled as a party favor, so it was a win-win!

The bug jars are sitting on a triangle-shaped wall shelf that I picked up at Marshalls for under $15. I almost always use inexpensive wall shelves to add height to candy and dessert buffets. It’s one of my favorite party styling tricks!

The printed designs and oversize bug-themed poster from this station are all included in my Camp Out (Pink) printable collection!

Camping Party Printables

My Camp Out printables are available in our store! (This theme also comes in a Navy color way.)