Balloon Balls

i know you’ve seen those balls made out of balloons filled with flour or rice. the ones you can squeeze when you’re stressed or just play around with. and most certainly you’ve thought, “there’d be nothing to making one myself.”

perhaps you thought, all you have to do is stick a funnel inside the balloon, put flour in it and it fills up. that’s what i thought. except the flour wouldn’t go down enough to expand the balloon. so i thought, all i need to do is blow up the balloon, keep it closed while i stick in the funnel, put flour in the funnel, and let the opening of the balloon open up so that the flour can slip in.

and this is indeed the perfect technique if you want to witness a sort of geyser spout forth flour in all directions. and also if you’d like to witness the spectacle of an ecstatic girl drawing and writing in the abundant flour on the table and then dancing in the flour on the floor.

it was quite entertaining, but let’s just say that it took me a little while to clean it all up. then i turned to the infinite knowledge of google and i found my solution: put the flour (or rice or whatever you want) in a little plastic bottle (or any other container with a small opening) with a funnel, blow up the balloon and, without letting the air out, slip it around the bottle opening. then turn it all upside down and the flour falls into the balloon.

it worked a charm! i was just a little worried because, if you squashed the balloon, it would expand a bit too much, until you could see the flour through the balloon skin and it looked like it was about to pop. i cut off the “neck” of another balloon with the intention of slipping the filled balloon inside the rest of the second balloon, so as to have more layers and therefore more protection against popping. except i couldn’t. the filled one kept slipping out.

then we noticed that the filled balloon looked an awful lot like a barbapapa, so my daughter drew on the attributes of barbalib (the orange-colored barbababy) and i made a little crown of flowers recuperated from a wedding favor. we think she came out quite nicely!

then we decided to do a project found on pinterest (like the ideas i wrote about here and here): make a hard balloon and rice ball. i followed the instructions, just using rice instead of lentils (and perhaps i also used that plastic bottle trick that worked so well with the flour, but i honestly don’t remember anymore), and it worked perfectly.

but poor barbalib came to a sad end after having been squeezed and thrown about once too often!