Making a Balloon Flower

Video Transcript

"Now we've made lots of balloon animals, so for a change I thought we'd make something completely different. I though perhaps a beautiful balloon flower. All the little girls just love balloon flowers and so do big ones too. So here's a good one to start with, just take two ends, you can see how I've left a little bit extra down here, which I am going to use to knot with this end, and tie them up, make one big circle. You're going to fold the balloon in half when you get to the end, and I'm pinching that. I'll hold it tight with my left hand and do the twisting with my right hand. This should remain still, one, two, three. Now you need to fold this up, like a letter "N", or letter "Z", fold it, and fold it again, make a letter "Z" or a letter "N". So that means, that way, I can get the exact same size, this is important, for the petals to be the same size as well. Now I am going to take each bend, each balloon end here, and pinch it. Pinch and twist it a couple of times. And then fold it again, pinch and twist it, and one more time. Now this is where it gets tricky. I am going to put my fingers right in the middle of the flower and squish hard, squash them all together. So now, my fingers are just holding tightly the flower. Now I'm going to pull, twist one, one way and the other, the other way. And there's our balloon flower and you get the prettiest balloon flower. Well this flower needs a stem, so I am just going to take the nice round pretty end, leave the knotty end at the other end, and you'll see that I've left a little bit of balloon with no air in it. That's so it slips easily through the center of the flower, it slips easily through that way. Now to make the flower bend nicely, rather than just looking at the sky, we need to add an extra fold in there. I'm going to do an ear twist in that bubble like we did in the cat's ear. And finally, I'm just going to fold this end one way, and the other way and the centers of both halves of the stem are the same size and pinch and twist it and we've got the balloon flower."