At first, we weren’t able to meet up and work on our giant jellyfish inflatable together, so we split up the work: Georgia focused on the main body while Heeyun made the tentacles. We had decided to make the main body be a dome with a “donut” ring going around it, all of which would be around 6 ft by 6 ft. The tentacles would be of varying lengths, but ideally all of them would be suspended above the ground/table to make it look like it was floating in air.
For the main body I decided to use a beach ball pattern. I had to do some math to figureout how long the pattern should be, especially since we were cutting the pattern in half to make dome shape rather than a ball. I indeed up making 8 giant dome pieces to sew together. They ended up being about 56 inches long which was a feat to put all the long pieces together. I was constantly concerned that the bobbin would run out of thread in the middle of sewing these pieces because how large they were. After I had gotten all the pieces sewn together I left one part open and didn’t completely close the shape together. I did this in order to add the donut, I thought it would be easier to leave this open when adding it. For the donut I cut out 8 rectangular shapes that were 16 inches long and sewed them on to the dome pieces, but I only left 8 inches to the bottom of the dome so that when it inflated it would inflate outward in a circular shape. Next I ended up cutting out circles in the original beach ball pattern for the air flow to get into the rectangles that would be the donuts. After this I sewed up the rest of the beach ball pattern. And asked Heeyun to cut out the last part of the top which would be the 6 by 6 foot circle.
For the tentacles, it was hard to make them at first because we wanted to include the ruffled texture from the fabric tentacles that Georgia had made for one of her push/pull 1 objects. The first few tentacles were improvised curvy tapered shapes, sewn together like pillows. Using some scrap triangular pieces of fabric, I decided to ruffle up the longest side of the triangle and then sew that end together to the next long side. Serendipitously, the ruffled edge spiraled around the overall conical shape of the structure, which is what we had wanted to make initially but were unsure how.
I ended up making the ruffled pieces of fabric like my last project, this was quite easy. I ended up putting them on while our piece was inflated so I could see where they needd to go. For Heeyun and I we got together to attach the tentacles(inflatable ones) to the circular base I had asked her to make. We ended up measuring her tentacles and cutting out circles for them to fit into in the circle. Sewing these on was a lot of fabric going everywhere. We had about 11 tentacles to sew on so after cutting the pieces out of the big main circle it looked like we had just cut out pokadots. After getting the tentacles attached, we added the big circle to the beach ball pattern, and then moved on to inflate.
When we finally assembled the jellyfish together, we both didn’t anticipate that the main body would be so much larger and rounder than the rest of the structure. If we were to make future iterations of this project, we would definitely consider the proportions of all the pieces more carefully. Moreover, a challenge we faced was getting the jellyfish to stay upright but also make it seem like it was floating in air. The center tube where it was connected to the fan was definitely not enough to keep the jellyfish from toppling over to the sides; the weight was not balanced enough, nor was it light enough to stay up with only the “support” from the constant inflow of air. As such, we improvised a “stand” made of sticks wrapped in attached together with electrical tape. After carefully balancing the jellyfish on this stand and against the wall, we managed to keep the jellyfish upright. This was a bit of a fix since we could not hang the piece as we originally intended.