Wear Your Heart With Pride By Guest Blogger Stuart Davies, CBA

PRIDE Parades are all about love, equality, and happiness. One of the symbols that has been adopted by many is the Rainbow Heart!

This is not an ORIGINAL design. Although different, it has its origins from the “Puffed Heart” design  Sue Bowler posted in the Very Best Balloon Blog a few years ago. The main change is that it has been extended to enable a regular strip of six colours needed for the rainbow. 

This design is very versatile and can be created with either 6" or 12" Qualatex^® Quick Links. It can be made bigger or smaller based on your needs. Adding it to a pole would make a fantastic parade piece, to a column for room décor, or even hung from a ceiling! A smaller version could also be used as a large table centrepiece.

For those of you who work with modelling balloons, it looks great woven with 260Qs or 350Qs. It is a relatively straightforward weave, even with six colours. I have tried it, and I made mine about 18" wide using 1.5" bubbles. I am sure those more skilled in the art of twisting and weaving could reduce the size below 10" - there's a challenge for someone! 

This heart is quick and easy to make, and regardless of size, it shouldn’t take much more than thirty to forty minutes from start to finish using an automatic air-inflator such as Conwin's Precision Air or Premium's Twin-Air Inflator


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I used Chris Adamo's Quick Link Calculator to map out the theoretical look first, and below is a representation of what it looked like. The 11" round balloons on the outer edge are actually Quick Links.

As with the original "Puffed Heart" design, it is made up of two layers and then brought together with one final chain. In this design, I used 105 - Quick Links plus 102 - 5". To fill in further you could use additional 5" or 11" duplets (depending if you used 6" or 12" Quick Links) to close the gaps left in the x-grid Quick Link structure.

In the image below the greyed-out balloons are the sides shown in the image above. There is a single chain connecting side one and two together. The rounder images are Quick Links; I was being lazy when doing the design and it was the only way to show that there was a single balloon connecting two points.

My way of completing would be to make both sides first, then tie these together at the same points around the sides all the way around, and then connect the chain on the outside edge using duplets of 5" rather than weaving or tying it in. 

After only five years of developing and growing his small family-run balloon business, Stuart Davies, CBA, of Beyond Balloons in South Wales, U.K., has already established an enviable client list. Last year Stuart very generously shared his experience working with Walt Disney International to create fabulous interactive decor for the Pride London Parade made entirely with Qualatex® balloons! To read this blog post, click HERE.





To read "How To Make a Puffed Heart Using Qualatex Quick Link Balloons - Click HERE

A huge thank you to Stuart for sharing his fabulous design with us today!


Happy Ballooning!

Sue
www.suebowler.com