Hot Air Balloon Garland

For August, I wanted a garland for my back window that was very cheery. There isn’t really a holiday associated with August, so it’s kind of a free form craft month.

I decided on a hot air balloon garland, and there were a ton of inspirational ideas out there. Most of them used the same folded and glued technique that I used for the Tulip Flowers mobile and the Paper Cactus. There’s nothing wrong with that, except I wanted to do something different.

So I kept looking, and found this super cute hot air balloon mobile. It was designed for a nursery, but nothing about it really screamed “baby” to me. What did stand out was the paper weaving technique, which is something I never had tried before.

And down the rabbit hole I went. This site is full of amazing creations, and the instructions, patterns, downloadable files and videos you need to make them.

I’m not going to lie – this wasn’t really easy. But it wasn’t impossible. It was just really amazing to me to go from these two flower/spider looking things …

To an actual hot air balloon!

There is no way I can explain how to do these better than the site does. Once you get one done the rest are pretty easy, but the learning curve is a little steep. So if you want to create these, I highly recommend you follow their instructions.

I do have a few tips:

1. Watch the videos. before you start assembling. And then do the first one near a device where you can replay bits of the video so you can really see what you are supposed to be doing.
2. Definitely use the paper clips as clamps to keep it all from unraveling as you go.
3. I used tacky glue instead of glue stick for the gluing of that last row. It was easier for me.
4. Consider assembling the basket before you do the weaving of the balloon. Here’s why – the basket is really fussy, and if you give it time to dry between the two parts that need assembly, it goes better. And if you have the baskets done, then adding the balloon on it easy. If you go the other way, if you are like me, you will be impatient to get the balloon finished and rushing the basket assembly means a crushed basket assembly.
5. If you are going to create a garland out of these, poke holes and thread loops into the balloon BEFORE you add on the basket. I nearly cried when I realized that I hadn’t thought that step through and it was very difficult to get the loops in when it was all assembled.

I was really happy with my balloons when there we finished, and I made some quick clouds to go between them on my garland. For this, I did use that fold and glue technique to get the 3D pieces.

First I drew up a simple cloud. And in reality, I didn’t draw anything, I just kept making circles of different sizes until they globbed together to make a cloud shape. These need to be perfectly symmetrical side to side to work, so plan that out as you go.

Using the Pathfinder tool in Illustrator, I welded those together to get my shape, and then exported the file as a DXF format, because the standard version of Silhouette can’t work with an Illustrator file, but it can import the DXF file with no problem.

In Silhouette Studio I duplicated that cloud shape until I had nine on a page (each cloud requires three pieces), and then sent that to cut on some smooth white 80# cover stock.

Once they were cut and weeded, I folded each one in half, and then glued two halves together for each cloud, and let those dry a minute before gluing (and wiggling) in the third folded piece.

Before I added in that last piece, I slid in a loop of dental floss to serve as the hanger for my garland.

Once everything was dry, I strung them all on twine and hung them on my hooks the back window. Since that window faces the sun, it’s impossible to get a decent photo, so the feature shot at the beginning of the post is that garland on my dining room wall.

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