So, here it starts. My first blog-post. I just decided, a couple of days ago, that I will create a website and a blog, so this hasn’t really been planned that much upfront. I hope most of the bugs on the website have now been solved and the site is readable also on mobile… Please let me know if you have any problems. But now, let’s try to make the short story long ;-).
It all started in August 2014. I went to a local store (Clas Ohlson) with my kids – I ended up buying a bag of twisting balloons, modelling balloons, magician’s balloons – a beloved child has many names 🙂 (I later learned, that among professionals, these balloons are called “260”. 260 means that when fully inflated, the balloon is 2 inches in diameter and 60 inches in length). I just thought this would be a nice way to spend an evening with kids (4 and 6 years old) – twist some balloon dogs and swords.
It took about two hours, when all the balloons were either transformed into dog, mouse, giraffe… while rest of the balloons “went ballistic”/explolded. Even if the balloon twisting was interesting, I was really annoyed about the fact, that the balloons exploded so easily. This was actually the major reason I went to google for “professional balloon twisting”, “balloon magician” and so on – just to see, if there actually were any better balloons, that can be handled like I had seen “The professionals” to handle their balloons.
I ended up into some magicians blog, where they discussed about best modelling balloons – there was supposed to be two major brands: Qualatex and Sempertex/Betallatex, which are (to best of my knowledge) the same balloons sold with different brand in different countries (and there seems to be continuous discussion about which is better – Qualatex vs Sempertex and Betallatex). I ended up ordering a couple of bags of Qualatex 260 balloons (also referred to as 260q, 100 balloons/bag) from ebay (some random UK-based seller which I currently don’t remember), since the balloons were cheaper there even with shipping costs (roughly 10 euros /bag) than in Finland…
It only took a couple of days before the balloons arrived and I guess this is the point where my journey actually really began. This was in the beginning of August 2014 – still sunny and warm even up here in Northern Finland :-). I took my football pump and started testing, if the balloons really were better than the “market-balloons” I had tested earlier. I was amazed, how big the difference actually was. I think I only popped 2-3 balloons from the first bag of 100, even if I really couldn’t handle the balloons that well.
Let’s take a small jump back in time, when I was waiting for the shipment to arrive. While googling for the better twisting balloons, I also ended up in YouTube and on advanced balloon twisters’ websites:
Michael Floyd: http://balloon-animals.com/category/challenges/ and http://www.youtube.com/user/balloonanimals
Holly George (previously Hopper): http://www.youtube.com/user/hollybearyhaleystar
Jeremy (The Balloon Bandit): http://www.youtube.com/user/TheBalloonBandit
and bunch of others, some of which I will be listing in latter blog posts. There are a lot of great balloon artists out there, that make these videos available… Big thank you to all of you!
Especially Michael Floyds “Win or Fail” -videos (http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLkbFkY1_qG3gQ2RayAmGYucdCSLCpQmcK) made me really interested in more “advanced balloon twisting”. It seemed, like there was nothing you couldn’t make out of balloons.
When I finally had the Qualatex-balloons in my hand, I started twisting. First I made an elephant, some-sort-of-dinosaur (it was supposed to be a T. Rex, but I couldn’t identify that even by myself 😃) and a frog. I can’t say that these were any masterpieces, but they could have been worse, I guess…
One day, about two weeks after receiving the balloons (and I guess roughly about 4-6 hours of balloon-twisting experience in total), I had an hour of “my time”, when the children went to bed… I opened youtube and started doing Goofy from step-by-step instructions:
I guess it took a little bit more than half an hour to do this, but I was quite happy with the result. I must say, that the feeling I had was probably something like Goofy has in the picture 🙂 – Feeling like a winner! It seems, that it was not that hard… but I guess it’s time for me to go to bed now and continue my story another day/night.
juho@pallotaide.com