February 7 - 12 Petal Flower

The strangest thought came to me on this morning
As I awake to greet the coming dawn
The sun was hardly peaking through the garden
It felt that with everything I was one

Then I wished that I could come back as a flower

~ Stevie Wonder Come Back As A Flower

I was trying to find a good balloon to make as thanks to our office manager at work. I've tried to casually ask for a favorite animal or movie or something to no avail, so I figured flowers would be a safe choice.

This flower is one of Vyacheslav Andrienko's designs (link). Typical flowers are 6 or 7 petals, but Vyacheslav uses a method were you can somewhat reliably get 12 petals in a nice curved form.

It's a good technique but certainly requires some practice, when using that many flower petals cramped so closely together, they need to not only be the perfectly same size - but also have the same air pressure within the bubbles, or things start looking off.   I got close on a couple, but Vyacheslav was able to casually make them in the course of the video so I know it's possible. A couple of mine became 10 petal flowers...

Our fur baby was aggressively wanting attention, but not in a "take my picture" way.  This is the only shot where he is in focus.

Baby's breath?  No ... he use a pump.

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Other posts with Vyacheslav's designs:
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December 21 - Snowflake

Let the winter sun shine on
Let me feel the frost of dawn
Fill my dreams with flakes of snow
Soon I'll feel the chilling glow

~ Black Sabbath Snow Blind

This snowflake design is the most recent video from Vyacheslav Andrienko, one of a few different snowflakes he teaches on his YouTube channel (link).   (I just now went and counted -- there are six!)  This one has a well thought out efficiency in design and is a good exercise for working with 160's which can be frustratingly fragile at times if you are not careful.

I imagine it a difficult thing to teach balloon art when you speak a different language, but not so for Vyacheslav - long before he was putting English subtitles into his videos, he was still able to communicate very clearly by carefully showing his finger measurements.  Indeed I still find myself following his fingers more than I do the precise lengths that are given in the text.

There is a wealth of balloon twisting knowledge on his channel, from simple techniques and weaves to decor to complex sculptures, all generously made available for free - over 350 at this point by my count.  Frankly I'm a bit shocked that this is the first of his designs that I have used on the blog, being that I have made so many of them in the past to experiment with and play.  I suppose I get distracted by the tutorials that I have purchased ...

Caught one!

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Other posts with Vyacheslav's designs: Show all