The title of this post is something many of my friends were thinking and some even said it out loud… Why a grown-up man started to play with latex balloons suddenly? I don’t blame them for wondering, since that would probably come to my mind also, if one of my friends would have started balloon twisting…

In my earlier posts I focused on telling the story about how it all started more from technical point of view and how did I start to develop my technical skills of balloon twisting. This time I decided to also open up a little bit about the reasons behind “my journey into balloon twisting” and also try to answer to the question: Why?

Back in 2014, when it all started, I had a 7-year old daughter and a 4-year old son. I worked (and I still work) in the industry and had quite stressful job. I’ve never been good in leaving my work behind and I had finally come to a point, where the stress really started to build-up – day after day and week after week… I was clearly going towards burn-out at this point.

Something had to be done. I think one of the biggest reasons why the stress started to build up was that I didn’t have a actual hobby to help clear my head after over 10-hour working days and 50-60 hours of work a week… Family of course sets some limits what you can do, if you already spend over 10 hours a day at work and then have your own hobby outside of home, which may take another hour or two. So I guess I was at a point, where I was (unknowingly) seeking some hobby or activity to help clear my head – balloons certainly were not in my mind at that point, but they were the first thing that just happened to work for me. I guess it was just a series of coincidences really: working stress – bad quality balloons from local store – order of professional quality balloons (just for fun) – artistic Juho getting out from the shell – finding Facebook-groups with similar interest – good feedback from other balloon artists/twisters – development of balloon manipulation skills – and here we are now 🙂

The fact is, that after about one year of twisting, my interest towards balloons was slowly fading and I thought there was not enough new to learn for me… then I saw David Lima’s new technique called Lima-twist in one of the balloon twister’s Facebook-group. This was back in July 2015. Until then, I hadn’t used a penny to learn new techniques – all the money I had used for my hobby had gone to balloons so far and I had watched some YouTube -videos, where I had learned some basic technical skills needed to twist balloons… This time I decided to buy the technique and thought I should see if it would have any effect to my interest towards twisting balloons. I actually thought that I would probably slowly diminsh my balloon twisting hobby and try to look for something else to do…

But oh boy was I wrong! The Lima-twist actually woke a completely different kind of balloon twister in me: I started experimenting with the technique and at that point I started to think more like an artist than just a twister… I started to play with Lima-twist after few weeks and mastering the “basic” technique well enough. I also had fruitful discussions with David Lima – the creator of the technique. Those discussions were actually my first real interaction with other balloon artist. The encouragement I got from those discussions and also from the other artists, especially from Helen Budinger, who is kind of like the Guardian Angel of all balloon twisters – if no one else give you the needed feedback, she will encourage you to go on. Those experiences actually made me just dive into the balloon twisting more deeply. David Lima and Helen Budinger are one of the nicest and warmest people I’ve ever spoken with, although never face to face, and hopefully we will actually meet one day.

At this point I also started to explore other balloon artists’ sculptures and found Pascal Grooten’s amazing futuristic creations, where he used many techniques I hadn’t seen before. One of those techniques was “windowed” balloons. He had done for example beautiful submarines using this window-technique and I decided I just had to find out how… So I started experimenting and after couple of hours I had my first submarine ready – far from perfect, but I had found out how the windows could be done!

In October 2015 I found out about Qualatex Color Quest which is an international balloon competition organized by Qualatex. The idea in the competition is to use mainly one color, the last color remaining at that point was red. Even though I had only been twisting balloons about one year and most of the sculptures created for the contest in earlier years were just amazing, I quickly decided to participate in the contest and ordered red Qualatex balloons for this purpose. The main sculpture I created for this competition was this red ultralight helicopter. It was allowed to use also small amount of other materials than balloons in the competition, but I decided to use only latex balloons. I utilized both the newly learned window-technique and Lima twist in the helicopter. Eventually the helicopter turned out quite ok:

The results from the competition were revealed just at the end of 2016, more than a year after I sent my pictures for the competition. I ended up being in 9th place, which probably wasn’t too bad for a beginner like I was…

After few months of playing with Lima twist and basically using the Lima twist in all my balloon creations during that time, Qualatex Brazil wanted to share my Facebook-post at the end of 2015, where I had created a Santa Claus using only Lima-twist: https://goo.gl/QK3ekc

This was probably the final nail in the coffin, that sealed my future as a balloon artist. At this point I knew I was on a right track with my little hobby…

Thank you all for your support and keep twisting (or whatever keeps you going)! Do what you like and not what other people expect you to do!

juho@pallotaide.com