My website!

I forgot to tell you about my new website. I'll have to add a gallery soon, but here is the link to the page:

www.sunnyballoons.com



Have a look-see, and tell your friends about it!

So Much Time, So much learned...

I can't believe it's been over three months since I have written here. In the mean time, things have changed, happened, and progressed nicely. I am constantly hungry for new designs and new material. YouTube is my friend. In May, mother's Day weekend, I started my first gig at the Outback Restaurant in South Lakeland. By mother's day weekend, I mean ALL of Mother's Day weekend. So my fingers were sore, and I couldn't unbutton any buttons after all that work. I used up so many balloons that I had to order more before starting at Buffalo Wild wings the following Sunday. In the mean time, I got my business cards and my website set up. Since then, I have been twisting on Friday nights at Outback and Sunday and Wednesday nights at Buffalo Wild Wings. Here are a couple of balloons I've been doing during slow times in the restaurants.

So that is it for now. I did do a birthday party today, and I'll be posting pictures of it as soon as I get them uploaded from my camera. In the mean time, ta-ta!

Not-so-festive, but bright

Last week, my uncle died. I was shocked and very sorry. The funeral was held just under a week later, and I got an email that after the service there would be a reception to celebrate his life. Celebrate. Well, what celebrates and is more festive than balloons, right? I know what you're thinking... Balloons? At a funeral? I got that same reaction from my aunt. I was scared to start, but I went in the back yard where the kids were playing, and sure enough, they didn't have a problem with the balloons. In fact they loved them. They wanted to pump them up, and have swords for sword fights. I learned a new sword before going down, and I"m glad I did. It was a two balloon sword where the blade is both balloons twisted together. It's much prettier than the average sword, and the kids liked 'em too.

The balloons didn't last long. They had been in the sun, and as soon as they touched the lawn they popped. But they were enjoyed, and that's the whole point.

Happy Birthday

Saturday - Today, in honor of my husband's birthday, I made a birthday cake... out of balloons. Yes I made the other kind too. This one actually took longer. I made a five wheel spoke, made pinch twists at the same distance from the center, and then connected the remaining tail to the pinch twist of the next spoke. Once all five were joined together, I made a small bubble, a pinch twist, then a long bubble joining the next balloon in the "spoke." After about three layers, I ran out of balloon. I could have added more balloons, but that's as far as I went. Then I made a string of bubbles across the top edge to represent the icing. I made a small orange bubble out of scrap, took a white scrap piece of balloon and inflated it partially and tied its knot to the orange bubble. I pushed the two knots down into the white balloon and made it sort of a tulip twist, which held the two knots inside the balloon. And there you have it.

Hearts and Flowers... but first a duck.

I'm just being honest with the title. Sorry if it sounds weird. I think it might be appropriate maybe to start explaining the process of how I get these sculptures done. First is the poptub fuck. I learned it from the Happy Cabbie on YouTube. I start out with a balloon that is half-inflated. (There are a lot of twists in this one.) I make two equal bubbles and join/lock them together. I then make two more bubbles the same size as the previous ones and join them to the first ones using the nozzle. The bubbles should look like a little pumpkin.

Get an orange balloon and work on the beak. First you make the cheeks with two small-ish flower twists. Then one big loop back in the middle between the two cheeks. Connect the beak to the head.

Now typically, you are supposed to carry on from the head using the same balloon, but I was using a scrap for the head, so I used a new balloon. I made a pinch twist in the back of the head to stabilize it, then a bubble for the neck. This was followed by a bird twist which is three longer equal-sized bubbles where one of the bubbles is pushed through between the other to and that holds it in place. In the bird twist was a pinch twist inserted by the neck. I also inserted a tail with three bubbles at the bottom.

A small blue balloon was partially inflated. It was attached at the pinch twist at the neck, twisted around the tail, then connected back at the neck. This was supposed to represent water, but to me it looked like an inner tube that the duck was using. I dunno. Here's the picture of the result:

I also made a few rose buds.They are made with three pinch twists at the top followed by the bird twist. Cut off the remaining balloon. To make the stem, you blow up your green balloon. Put five or six pinch twists at the nozzle end. If the balloon is not tight at the other end, you can insert leaves by making two flower twists. Voila!

Obviously in this example, I had some extra space in the green balloons, hence the leaves.

The heart is simple, but it's still necessary to be careful when making it. It is easily made lopsided. Anyway, after fully inflating a balloon, I make one-inch bubbles on either end and joined them. They made the point of the heart and I molded the point for where the two arcs meet at the top. To dress up the heart a little bit, I stuck two of the rosebuds in the heart. Here's what it looked like:

This is for the Birds

Thursday Yesterday, I had promised Micah a penguin. I didn't make the time to learn one, so I did today. But first I learned how to make a parrot. I really love what you can do by learning on YouTube. I guess you could almost call it YouTube U. Anyway, here are the parrot and penguin that I made.

Good things come in threes

You know the story of the three little pigs, three billy goats gruff, the three musketeers. Hey, I even have triplets. Well, on Wednesday (I skipped Monday and Tuesday) I made three of each of these characters. To practice my tulip twist, I made three pigs. Here they are:

Then I practiced my successive bubbles and learned to make a lion. The lions are cute, and I made three of them too. Here they are in their natural habitat:

Weakend Princess.

My husband bought Ken Stillman's DVD on making princesses. It was very inspiring, but I didn't have the right balloons. Also, his princess was almost life sized. I only had 260's and 6 inch heart shaped balloons. So I decided I would make do with what I had and make a princess out of those balloons. I must tell you, not all princesses are beautiful. This one was ugly. Take a look:

Despite the modest pose and the amount of time it took to make her, she is still no prize for a prince. I believe when I have the right materials, I will be making a more beautiful sculpture. Until then, this is my ugly princess.

Plane stuff

Okay, so I'm playing catch up. I went with the boys to an air show in Lakeland where we saw the Blue Angels. I though, hey, this is a good idea. I could do balloons at an airshow! I figured it might be important to know how to make an airplane. So I went home, and learned how to make an airplane from a few balloons. The video on Youtube showed how to make one with a teddy bear, and I did that, but the balloon was so tight that I kept popping it, and it looked better without anything. It worked well on a hat. This was done on Friday. No photos of planes though. It was a single prop plane and used three balloons. One for the wings, one for the body, and one for the propeller. Hat was an extra balloon.

Man and monkey

(Wednesday) Yesterday, even though I didn't post, I did learn a new design. It's a basic man shape. Very simple and uses two balloons. I didn't really like how the original design worked, so I modified it. Originally, two balloons of the same color would be used and everything would be done symmetrically so that one balloon was for the right side, and the other was for the left. What if the guy wanted red pants and a yellow shirt? So I modified the design to have the legs be done in one color, and the top be done in another color. It took some time to learn how to get things done evenly, working from one end to the other.

(Thursday) This morning we got up, saw the big pile of practice balloons in the corner, and since tomorrow is garbage day, we decided to pop all the old balloons that we didn't like or had deflated themselves out of shape. The boys had a blast (no pun intended).

Today I learned a few things. I learned how to make the dog in about 15 seconds. I learned how to make a dinosaur, but still have to work out how much air to put in, and how to twist it so that everything is even. Then I learned how to make the monkey in a palm tree. So now I need to go back to practicing my dinosaur. Here are the monkey and the dino anyway...

Teddy Bears and YouTube

So today we went to McDonald's again to practice making balloons and let the children bounce off some energy. I made about 6 flowers, and decided I needed to learn something while I was there. I checked out YouTube on my phone and looked up teddy bears. After about three bears, I made this little fella in 3 minutes 16 seconds.

Hats and crowns

I feel like I am very slow. I have just spent the last two hours twisting two or three hats. Two of them were somewhat complex, but they sure took a while! Steve suggested I be creative and come up with something that can be my own. Sort of like a trademark or something. Anyway, here are the fruits of my labors. I like the purple crown the best. It's the one that took the longest, and I did pop one balloon that kind of messed up the design, but since it is a little intricate, you might not notice.

There are Micah, Noah and Josiah in their hats. Noah liked the hat from yesterday so much he wanted to model it again today. After the picture, Josiah put on the "carousel" hat on over his head. It's so big, like on Micah, that he thinks he's a space man when he wears it.

Micah tried on the orange and blue (gator) crown.

Sunny Sunday

(Sunday) Today was a nice day. After church, I got home, made lunch, cleaned up, etc. Then balloon time came. I really hadn't planned on doing a new design because I only wanted to do five a week, and I had already done 6. Well, I watched Joe Montello's video. I tried doing the diamond ring. It was out of my league. I didn't know how much air to put into the balloon, and couldn't figure it out. I saw the video on the lady bug. Boy it was cute. Well, here are pictures of some of the balloons I made today.

This is Noah with the Jester had I made. He is holding a flower, and there is a tiny orange ladybug in his hat.

Josiah shows off his black beetle.

Micah's turtle is so cute.

The Video Posted

I don't know which video posted first - facebook or YouTube, but I like using Youtube better, so here's the link. Remember, it is time elapsed. The video is about three minutes, but it really took me four minutes to make the butterfly.

A balloon a day, continued...

(Saturday) Today I learned how to make a balloon butterfly. I actually videotaped myself making the fourth one. It was painstaking to watch. First of all, it was so slow. It took me about four minutes. Then, I kept making all these twists to fix things up, even though I wasn't finished with it. And then, the antennae. Well, it reminded me of learning to play the guitar. I would have sore fingers at the end of the session because I pressed so hard on the strings, but eventually, the fingers built up calluses to protect themselves. I kept squeezing and squeezing those antennae, and finally, the bubble came up on the end of one. Then I had to do the other one. I ended up pushing the balloon up against my leg. (Not very artistic or pretty.) I did learn that sticking out my tongue to show great effort is not so good. Anyway, I'm waiting for the video to post either on Facebook or YouTube. Whichever one comes first gets on the blog tomorrow. In any case, here's a screen clip of the finished balloon.

Besides the butterfly, I took the boys to the playground. I meant to take them to the outdoor playground, but by the time I got there, it was closed. So we went to McDonald's playground. The boys ate their fries, and I started twisting. I started making a sword for the only other kid in the playground. Then I started making flowers for my kids, and then others started showing up. In the hour and 15 minutes that I was there, I made 4 swords, 3 flowers, one dog, two mice, and a butterfly. That's eleven balloons in an hour. And they were relatively simple ones. I popped two balloons. But at least I got to practice and give them out. My balloon corner in the house is getting pretty full.

My first week

I placed a call to a balloon professional from San Diego (Sandi from Balloon Utopia), who gave me a few pointers about what I need to do to get started in the balloon twisting profession. She was very positive, and told me to make goals and practice. I made the goal to learn one new design a day.

Monday,(March 21) the balloons came in. YouTube became my friend. I looked up simple things like, how to tie a balloon, and how to make a dog, a sword, etc. My first balloon was a weird looking dog.

Tuesday, I added a sword to my repertoire. I didn't like most of the balloons they were teaching that had regular handles. I like the one with the bubbly handle, so I found a tutorial from Italy. Fortunately, it's not that important to understand everything they say, as long as you see what's going on. Here are the kids with their swords.


Wednesday, I worked on flowers. I found a video teaching how to make a rose. This was a little harder than a normal flower, but still functional. I made several, which looked nice as a bouquet. I also reviewed the dog and timed myself doing it. It took a minute and 15 seconds. The world record for making 100 balloon dogs in the least amount of time is 5:48 (that's minutes and seconds). Yes the balloons were pre-inflated. So was mine when I timed it. I have a LOT of work to do.

Thursday, I worked on a business card and got myself a domain name. although I haven't built the website yet, the web address is going to be www.sunnyballoons.com. I like the name. After all, I am in Sunny Florida, right? My new project for the day was a mouse. I also worked on and made a snake but that required mouth blowing. My neck is still sore from all the blowing that I was trying to do. Whatever will I do when I have to make curly cues?

Friday was a bit of a clean-up day. The boys helped me put all the balloons that were scattered all over the floor from the week into a corner, and I was able to vacuum the floor. Once the floor was vacuumed, Josiah and Noah decided they needed to help me pump balloons. Here they are:


I had planned to take them to the playground and do some practicing there, but time was not on our side, and that plan fell through. I used the Mario balloon that the boys had gotten from a balloon guy in Chili's and figured out how to make a Luigi. It took me over an hour, but here is what he looked like. It was not on the list of things to learn this week, but I did it any way.


And that's it for this week. I planned on blogging each day, but the delay was in starting the blog. I have one now, though, so I can now continue with my daily progress (possibly skipping weekends, or using weekends to review). I hope you enjoy following my progress, and in future posts, I hope to be very informative and educational.