June 30 - Jojo Parrot

"I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I needed to be."

~ Douglas Adams

Rose up this morning, smiled at the purple one,
Three little birds, with drunken hiccups,
There were parrots, there was one red - one blue, 

And one white cockatoo-oo-ooo.

Singing, "Where's wormy?  Roundish thing?

We're not the early birds, but we've been up all night!"

Singing, "Hey wormy!  'Ring-a-ling!'.

I think that was your clock, and I see sunlight!"

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I have no idea what I'm doing anymore.

Something to do with parrots drunkenly hitting on the early worm I think.  That's a thing, right?  

Made in Tobi Twist's Jojo style!


(view other birds or jojos)

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Other balloons by and inspired by Tobi Twist:

June 29 - Kalisan Blush

O blush not so! O blush not so!
Or I shall think you knowing;

~ John Keats Sharing the Apple (excerpt)

I have a high opinion of what a blush balloon should be, perhaps I was just spoiled by what we had.  Being "flesh tone" requires a bit of smooshiness to play with, if I can use that as a metric.  If just just based on what it has to go through trying to match the bizarre bends and distortions of limbs and features..  

Kalisan blush ... the color is good (comparisons on blog), but the texture is off - there is a plastic feel to them, and though they seem to have a decent firmness and don't feel thin, there were more than the typical number of random deflations and a bunch of spontaneous explosions during the course.

Every face I made had some sort of substantial blow-out, and early enough that I tossed it aside instead of fixing - the last attempt I was "defusing a bomb" careful.   No face images while testing a blush balloon, if that's not a sign ...

Overall assessment, Kalisan blush ... gonna be a pass for me, between the texture and the random failures, the formula just isn't (currently) right.  

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Other "color day" balloons:

June 28 - Jojo Penguin

"Change is inevitable;
Growth is optional."

~ John C. Maxwell

"Another penguin?"

... if I were a polar bear, I would say "yes please!"

... if I were a conservationist or research biologist with a grant to burn, I would shout "Hooray!"

... if I were a documentary narrator with a velvet british accent, I would shout "my word!"

... if I were a snowball with sentience, pondering upon life and existence during the dark winter storms, I would project *delighted apprehension!* with a flurry of flakes.

... alas I am but a balloon artist. Penguins are my inevitability.

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This is one of the starter designs from Tobi Twist's Jojo Cuties collection.  Like every modern rock album needs a ballad, every balloon design needs a penguin.   Rock on little bro.

[Truth told - I actually do enjoy building a new version of -any- animal.  This blog makes it easy and really fun at this point to look back and see the others that were built over time, and significant or subtle differences between them (links on website only unfortunately).   This is the 13th "penguin" post by my count.   Lucky!]

(view other penguin or jojos)

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Other balloons by and inspired by Tobi Twist:

June 27 - Rhino

"Stopping rhino poaching doesn't just mean stopping poachers, it also means stopping the illegal markets for rhino horn that drive this horrible trade. Challenging these markets, as with all our work, needs a team effort."

~ Jon Taylor, Managing Director, Save the Rhino International

One rhino is killed roughly every day.

Not for food. Not for defense. For a myth.

There are fewer rhinos now than ever before.

Learn what's being done, and what still needs doing, at savetherhino.org.

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This balloon design is one of the recent member videos from the Isopresso channel, fun one!  I made him just a breath or two on the side of too chubby.
 
(view other rhinos)

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Other balloons by and inspired by Isopresso:

June 26 - Jojo Chicken

"We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be."

~ Kurt Vonnegut - Mother Night

We lost a lot of good birds that year.

I don't think the cows were evil - just confused.  Corporate mercenaries given their own raw deal.   We could have stopped it, if only we had read the signs correctly.

"Eat Mor Chikin."

We thought it was a joke.

How would the humans fall for something so ridiculous?  

We laughed at the grammar.  

We laughed ...

... We lost a lot of good birds that year.

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This is another of the Tobi Twist "Jojo style" introductory critters, and it got me thinking about the Chick-fil-A cows in their ad campaign.  What a horrible misdirect, when the message could have simply been "eat less cow?"  

(view other chicken) or jojos)

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Other balloons by and inspired by Tobi Twist:

June 25 - Jojo Frog

Hey, everyone, it's time for JoJo's Circus!
(JoJo, JoJo's Circus!)
Get on your feet, we're gonna have some some fun!

~ Opening Theme to Jojo's Circus

I was looking through some older videos and noticed a few I hadn't explored yet.  ... I mean saved for this exact moment.

"Jojo Cuties" is a balloon concept introduced by Tobias Stengel (@tobi_twist) a few years back.  It built around a simple base jojo (yoyo) structure, compact and clever - and ideal for things that might perch on a bracelet or headband.  

This little bug muncher was the introductory design, a frog is another one of those universal designs and a perfect warm up to practice the techniques.

Let's see where this one goes!

(view other frogs or jojos)

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Other balloons by and inspired by Tobi Twist:

June 24 - Whale

"There is no folly of the beast of the earth which is not infinitely outdone by the madness of men."

~ Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

At rehearsal for our high school choir gala event, most people had registered to sing solo - I remember a somewhat quiet girl sang a hauntingly beautiful song about being an ice cream cone and melting into nothingness - she had such vocal presence as she drifted into almost a whisper.

I had wrangled three friends into a barbershop quartet to sing "Old Jonah" (had a whale of a time in a whale!) - sailor jackets, classic barbershop harmonies and a moment where I turned around and wiggled my "tail".  It was a goofy high-school skit and I thought we sounded great.

Then ... ... five boys walked out snapping their fingers, in white shirts and dark glasses.  They launched into a doo-wop medley that could have been at the end of an 80s flick (literally, this was '89). The crowd went Beatles-crazy in response, they put their sunglasses back and walked off snapping their fingers again.  Brilliant.  So cool.

I'm in the audience wearing a grey shirt-costume that says "I Am The Whale".   

One of those clarity moments on just how cool I am.

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This whale (of a time in a whale) - is the latest instructions shared by Isopresso on their YouTube channel. The ventral throad grooves took tying to get them to sit right for me, having them tighter would make it so you wouldn't have to because the fins do much of that work. 
(view other whales)

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Other balloons by and inspired by Isopresso:

June 23 - Coiled Snake

"There's a snake in my boot!"

~ Woody, Toy Story

To pay proper credit - I stumbled across an image similar to this on in a "Year of the Snake" Pintrest board and reverse image searched it back to a Facebook post by Ryo Tam.

It was the "don't bother me, I'm smothering something" face that won me over.  

The design has a good bit of the Isopresso maggot in getting some tight organic looking coils looking ... unsettling.  

(view other snakes)

June 22 - Anagram Festival Colors

"A clever arrangement of bad eggs will never make a good omelet."

~ C.S. Lewis

Anagram generously included a big sampler pack of balloons at this year's Twist & Shout convention.   I usually avoid multicolor packs - I'm rarely looking for "any color".   But a mixed bag actually gives a decent generalized feel for the brand overall and it seemed like a perfect day to try out this rainbow assortment.

There is a stiffness you can feel when uninflated - if they were even possible to inflate by mouth, you would not look pretty trying.  

They are tight when inflated and it takes both of my hands squeezing to blurp the air down into the next uninflated section - so if you don't pre-inflate/release, you'll have to pay attention to not get an oddly uneven tail as is expands unpredictably.

Overall assessment - it's hard not to be comparative to other brands.  The colors are bright and nicely opaque, they stretched and softened easily after that initial tightness and withstood many abuses without ... report?  A good sponginess to twisting that in a few twists got tight and needed another blurp.  If you pre-stretch/inflated and used an electric pump, you could probably build a car engine with these balloons - but they're not for me.

The heart follows a Sergey Loginov design and the flowers are actually a section of Zoa Coral from Isopresso and the egg was originally from Chun-Lin Sung.

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Other "color day" balloons:

June 21 - Rainbow Isopresso

"If you could only sense how important you are to the lives of those you meet; how important you can be to the people you may never even dream of."

~ Mr. Rogers

There's obviously more than one way to make a rainbow.

This design is from the Isopresso channel, and I love the imagery of the unbroken rainbow chain forming the arc.  

Alone, they're bright -- together, they're unbreakable.

Isopresso shared this design idea on their YouTube channel.  I like the visual puzzle it creates - you think rainbow before you notice.

🌈

(view other rainbow)

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June 20 - Rainbow Penguin

"When you put love out in the world, it travels, and it can touch people and reach people in ways that we never even expected."

~ Laverne Cox

A normal bird would have made much more sense to have in rainbow colors, but the image of all these guys lined up kept pinging and pinging around my head.

So I let the ping win.

[runs away]

[car door slams]

[tires screeching] 

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(view other penguin)

June 19 - Rainbow Flowers Kanesan

"Deep in their roots, all flowers keep the light."

~ Theodore Roethke

I know I JUST made a rainbow flower, but Balloon Art Kanesan made such a cool one and kind of achieved the (what I had thought was) impossible.

Technically 7-petal flowers are at the very extent of tightness, they work great as a base - even if you lose a petal or even two, they still look like a flower. A 9-petal flower is like raising an auction bid by an amount that shocks the crowd.

A couple smart ideas that kind of come together to make this work.  My first attempt (as always) was a bit wonky, but not irredeemable by grouping the petals the right way.  It was a rough draft but as I look at it now - I like the sort of triangular face grouping the smaller color sections together.

(view other rainbows or flowers)

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Other balloons by and inspired by Balloon Art Kanesan: