Friday, March 1, 2013

American balloon flag


Materials: balloons, an air pump, scissors and correction liquid (whitening).

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 Buy an air pump on Amazon (paid link): 

This instruction is an addition to previously published instruction Fabric 9, Flags 4. We are going to make USA flag making fabric basically in the same fashion as we did in mentioned Fabric 9, Flags 4. I want to make this flag of one almost fully inflated balloon length. We are going to use fourteen blue, fourteen red, and twelve white balloons to make total of thirteen rows. And in this example I use two sets (total of ten) clear connection balloons. Inflate all balloons to make the rows leaving about one-inch flat tail. Inflate all connection (clear) balloons leaving about six-inch flat tail. 

We are going to twist bubbles of the same about eight-inch size to make rows. And we twist the short size bubbles of half the size of the large bubbles. So, the size of short bubbles is about four-inch. Total we are going to make thirteen rows. The size of a row in bubbles is four long and one short bubbles. I think the number of bubbles in row is more important than the length of the bubbles for this sculpture. We can work the sculpture starting from any side: left, right, top or bottom. I rather work this sculpture from the bottom side to have a better visual guide lines for twisting the right size bubbles of the two colors (blue-red and blue-white) top seven rows. In this example, the size of the blue rectangle is seven rows and each row is two large bubbles long. We can use white balloons to represent stars on the flag. For instance we can make five points stars in the same fashion as described in previously published instruction Flower 7, Five Petals Ring. Or just make number of small one-inch soft bubbles to represent stars. Also, for this size sculpture you have to use much less than fifty stars or make very large size flag to place all fifty stars. In this instruction I use correction liquid (from office supply store) to paint all fifty stars. Also, the correction liquid works very well as base paint. Once it dry out you can paint over it using any color paint or marker. The correction liquid (or fluid) is very hard to remove from balloon, so pay attention when using it. First, I mark with little dot every spot where I want to paint a star, and then I paint the stars. Once again, this is a large sculpture. It takes time to make it. It is safer to walk around large sculpture to twisting bubbles then move the sculpture around to twist bubbles. Have fun and happy twisting :) 


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