May 16 - Dragonfly

"Yesterday a child came out to wonder
Caught a dragonfly inside a jar.
Fearful when the sky was full of thunder
And tearful at the falling of a star."

~ Joni Mitchel The Circle Game

Clayton James (YouTube personality ChiTwist), is a hard worker in the balloon industry. In addition to other things he also runs the Balloon Twister Central Facebook forums and the website.  Clayton is another one of the balloon twisting titans of YouTube, his channel started in 2010 and has almost 19k subscribers at this point with something like 400 videos.  Recently he has been looking back and attempting to remake some of his older videos, this was the first one of those.  I never built his original dragonfly, but he did link the video for comparison sake "and a laugh" as he said, the earlier version looks nothing like this one, this was a worthy candidate for update!

Clayton's video's cover a wide range of simple quick designs to more complex, but mostly they are all very quickly done, and this is quick to build as well.  With the two attachment points at the bottom you could make this wearable very easily.

I like designs like this, they are perfect for balloons from the random jumble pile that tends to amass.

One interesting fact I read about dragonflies is that they flap their wings a mere 30 times per minute, compared to a bee or housefly which have to flap about 600-1000 times per minute. That seems like it would be a misprint, I've always thought their wings were vibrating like a fly, not just flap-flap-flaping. It's kind of creepy thinking of them flapping slowly like a miniature bird, wait .. like a miniature dragon! Okay - they are cool again. Obviously reality is different and they beat their wings so fast that we can't even see a flap without high speed recording devices, and numbers are cheated somewhat because they have two sets of wings, but once every other second to keep you in a perpetual state of transition to freefall is no less amazing.

Nose buddies!