Cardboard Challenge

Hot Air Balloons and a Simple Pulley System

My original inspiration was a picture I found on cardboardchallenge.com (https://goo.gl/images/JE8Uj8) –I was completely in love with the whimsy of the balloon and initially imagined that I would make a simple pulley system where I was the force that made the balloon rise and fall by pulling a string over some bobbins mounted on a cardboard background. Once I made the first balloon and attached a basket, however, I realized that I could put a bottom on the basket and make it actually hold items to make a kind of scale, which would make the rise and fall more interactive and experimental.

Early stages--now with even more mistakes and missteps!

I started with balloon-shaped pieces of cardboard that I tried to assemble using slits and placing the pieces crosswise/perpendicular to one another, but there wasn’t enough stability and the pieces all just flattened out. Then I tried making incrementally larger pieces to slide over each other, which made for more stability, but didn’t have the aesthetic I wanted.

Fashioning the Balloons

Finally, I realized that I could have a flat balloon shape in the center, to which I could glue matching pieces that I had bent vertically and tied with a slip knot with crochet yarn to keep them open

I made the circles and ran the string through them to help stabilize the basket for when it would actually hold items—and also because I liked how it looked. The baskets are long cardboard rectangles that I bent into a square and glued together. Once they dried, I glued bottoms inside them. I used a large embroidery needle and some wooden skewers to drop the yarn down the center channel of the flat (and stable) balloon component for each balloon, and then I glued the end of the string to each balloon’s bottom, above the basket.

Setting up the pulleys

I used that string to thread the pulley system, which originally had 3 pulleys. I mounted the pulleys, which were actually sewing bobbins with wooden skewers through them, onto a cardboard stand that I used over the edge of a bar-top counter in a pass-through window between the dining room and kitchen of the vacation house we were renting for Memorial Day weekend. I used a flat piece of cardboard, and I bent a second piece of cardboard to the back to create a stand. I also slid 2 bottles of water into the stand to weigh it down so that it wouldn’t tip over when we started putting rocks in the balloons’ baskets. We tried clementines as our first weighted material, but the baskets weren’t really big enough to hold the fruit, so we switched to rocks.