May 20 - Cake Boss / Cupcake Head

Cake, and grief counseling, will be available at the conclusion of the test.
~ GLaDOS

Wednesday night our youngest spoke those words every parent dreads to hear just as they are saying goodnight.  "I need a costume by Friday."

Usually this is something that his mother handles, she's far more crafty than I am - but after we finally deduced that "Cake Boss" wasn't the TV show guy and was actually some sort of Dick Tracy-type villain with a cake for a head, this seemed to be the easiest answer!

I had seen pictures of gigantic quicklink cupcakes online, and figured I could make a smaller version. It took two attempts to get sizing right, but I'd call it arrrrgh-last-minute-give-me-more-notice-next-time success!

Cupcake²

I volunteered for the sprinkle clean-up crew!

May 19 - Angrier Birds

“You will not be punished for you anger,
 You will be punished by your anger.”
~ Buddha

I had not met Nicole Greg before Sunday night, it was her birthday and yet she took the time to teach us these angry bird designs based on the movie (which had already released in Australia) in a webinar.    She is an Australian balloon artist with a rock-n-roll style who has published at least 5 DVD instructions based around quick link balloons, so if we have a Queen of Hearts, perhaps Nicole should be crowned the Queen of Quicklinks?  Lady Link? .... Zelda? ok, we've gone too far.

I like the nice distorted pear shape for the body, I didn't have a yellow to try building that style, but it was pretty similar.  The pigs use a pretty cool face structure, and the way she assembles it gives you a lot of control over the attachment points, making them nice and snug. I wasn't too taken with using the giant Qualatex eyes, I couldn't get them even and ended up with gigantic dialated pupils.  It's a disembodied floating head, but I definitely could see me using this structure again.

I haven't seen the movie yet (I have barely played the game) - but it seems like the pigs are the ones who should be angry.  Those gigantic supermarket-style eggs are twice as big, clearly store-bought and would be impossible to have been laid by these overly-aggressive flighted birds.  They can't lay claim to them just by nature of being a bird.  These birds are even stealing golden faberge egg replicas and causing wanton property destruction.  It's criminal.

Remember for your breakfast, the chicken worked a day on it - the pig worked it's whole life!

One of the things I love about these webinars is that I rarely know what we'll be building. It's most always been something useful and I've always learned something but I'm learning things I didn't even realize I wanted to know. It's a bi-weekly glimpse into the mind and fingers or someones twisting style.  Maybe someone I've never heard of!   I have been introduced to so many balloon artists through these bi-weekly gatherings.

Also, the webinar is FREE if you use your Facebook profile image to advertise the Bling-Bling Jam.  I've done much more for far less. :)

Day 1 - I have successfully infiltrated their ranks.	Not-so-angry Bird
We DO have bodies!

May 18 - Poppy Corn

"Every once in a while, someone will mail me a single popcorn kernel that didn't pop. I'll get out a fresh kernel, tape it to a piece of paper and mail it back to them."
~ Orville Redenbacher

People have been posting Shopkins images and designs for a while, but when John Justice released his recipes at the Twister's Cookbook - it was an easy insta-buy for me.  John is an amazing balloon artist with a keen eye for details, he's also a master Sharpie artist and has a knack for taking things to the level beyond the next level.  You would do well trying to copy from him so I'm glad he's making it easy by releasing videos!

Shopkins...

I don't understand it, maybe I'm getting just getting old, but I don't understand how fads like this take on life over other things.  I've known they are cute little food creatures by the pictures I've seen, but from intensive ... casual Wiki scanning, I've learned they are small little eraser type things.  I think they actually do erase, but it seems a little cruel to be smooshing Fikly Foo the Carrot's face into your mistake.

This is really demonic marketing as well, you buy a random pack hoping for a certain character -- or at least hoping not to get the same character.  They build in rarity in both type and having variant versions, they are breeding faithful young consumers.

This one is called Poppy Corn, (from the wiki) from season 2 -  is says she likes to go to the movies. Which I think would be the last place she would ever want to be.  Don't people grab her hair?  Eat her friends?   Morbid!

BUT .. denying most and only allowing certain truths to resonate, this is a pretty cute little popcorn thingy.  John goes into great detail demonstrating not only the balloon creation, but also the facial artwork and "twister tips" as he shows the model.

I'm a variant!
Let me just pop in the middle of you two!

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Other posts with John's designs:


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May 17 - Geo Crab

Crab people, Crab people.
Taste like crab, talk like people.
  ~ The Crab People (link)

Here is another use of Matt Falloon's flower bud concept.  This one was an idea that was come up in collaboration with Brett Bollich (sp?) and Tawny Bubbles in the Twist & Shout jam room after Matt presented his initial ideas.

The crab is a nice use of the round shape created by adding another Geo to the bunch, this takes a bit of muscle to get things into place, but the structure seems very sturdy. I think three has to be the limit, it's mine at least!

What do you mean, no wild berry 260's?!

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Other posts with Matt's designs:


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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!

May 15 - Drum

Life is about rhythm.  We vibrate, our hearts our pumping blood, we are a rhythm machine.  That's what we are.
~ Mickey Hart

The second of the bonus video for the Balloon Blast Show Rubber Band is a drum.

The drum starts out the same way as the banjo. On my second build I once again accidentally made the drum portion a little bigger, but this time I used a 350 outer ring and it looks much better filling that area and gives a nice tight fit so that both sides of the drum look good.

This drum is designed to be the standing/marching band style, and Sam includes details on how attach the shoulders straps, but I figured they would just get in the way of the pictures.

The only real "upgrade" to the second version is that it's a cleaner second build using gold instead of yellow and I tried a different stick style.

	Upgrade!
I gotta have more cowbell!

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Other posts with Balloon Sam's designs:


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May 14 - Droid Cuties

“Robots are important also. If I don my pure-scientist hat, I would say just send robots; I'll stay down here and get the data. But nobody's ever given a parade for a robot. Nobody's ever named a high school after a robot. So when I don my public-educator hat, I have to recognize the elements of exploration that excite people. It's not only the discoveries and the beautiful photos that come down from the heavens; it's the vicarious participation in discovery itself.”
~ Neil deGrasse Tyson

May the Fourteenth be with you!

This fourth installment marks and end of this batch of Corinne Sparkles Smith character cuties.  I hadn't forgotten, and what Star Wars anything would be complete without our ever-present artificial companions?

R2-D2 and BB8 instructions were shown in the video series, but she must have opted not to include C-3PO for some reason.  He was in the crowd shot of the characters though so I pulled up a freeze frame and tried to copy as best I could.  BB8 looks great in form, that one takes a lot of sharpie.

Also, since this is the last installment of these charcter cuties I figure I would include a couple that didn't quite work out - Ackbar and Greedo.

I used a different tail when creating Jabba, I was so excited to have a use for those chubby wavy balloons.

You'll be malfunctioning within a day, you nearsighted scrap pile!
"It's a fail!"
Let's head over to Pizza the Hutt

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Other posts with Corinne's designs:


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