Giving The Octopus Another Shot

Been too long; I need to set aside time right after a shift to put some thoughts down.

Since writing, I have added a monkey, a rhino, a pterodactyl, a bat, and an octopus to my design list.

The octopus is my favorite design ever. Everyone’s surprised you can make an octopus (I had a waitress ask for an octopus as, she thought, a joke), since it sounds complicated and outlandish, and this particular design (courtesy of Michael Floyd of balloon-animals.com fame) is huge and impressively tentacular. It’s a real attention grabber, especially if -- now hold the sides of your head together firmly, because I’m about to blow your mind -- one wears it as a hat, with two tentacles wrapped around your head, as if the octopus is grabbing you from behind.

I actually learned the octopus months ago, when I was first learning to twist balloons. However, it would take me a few minutes to make, which is too long for restaurant work, and a tentacle or two would often pop, leaving you with a septopus or (heh) sextopus. I hadn’t even tried to make one for a couple months, and then gave it a shot late last week and found it easy and fast.

So what made the octopus possible now, where it wasn’t before? A few things: (1) I’m just a faster and more confident twister. (2) I’m taking better care of my balloons, no longer using weeks-old oxidized easily popped ones. And (3) I’m “burping” the balloons when needed, not rarely or (perhaps worse) all the time. Burping a balloons is when, after inflation, you let some air out before tying the balloon off. In the octopus’ case, the tension of eight fully-inflated tentatcles pushing against each other was killing me every time, and burping them, along with better balloons and a better twister, made all the difference.

So I suppose the next step is to take my newfound abilities and confidence and make another go at the apple twist, a technique that has vexed me sorely in the past.

Stay tuned, balloon loons.