I wanted to make my first inflatable interactive and play with darting. I made a gnome out of a cone and then used darting to bulge the eyes. I had a lot of trouble sewing the eyes onto the cone, and the stitches look messy, but it does fit with the chaotic and goofy nature of the gnome. After the original string that allowed the gnome to be scrunched to the user’s preference was broken, I added another one in, but I don’t like the way this scrunches the gnome as much as the way the original string did.
My second inflatable I wanted to play around with connecting shapes together, so I made three intersecting spheres. This one was really hard for me to think through, and I needed to meet with Olivia to talk it through. I made it by sewing together the green, pink, and turquoise pieces together and then adding on the other halves of the spheres. I used 6 different colors both to make it easier on myself to visualize how it will go together and because I like the playfulness of the multicolored patterns.
For my third inflatable, I wanted to make the Murakami flower design because I really like the pattern, and I think it’s really simplistic but cool. This one also took me a while to think through and a lot of playing around by pinning the pieces together and then reversing them until I figured out how it would work. There was no pattern for the petals, so I had to make my own pattern, and I used the cone pattern for the two yellow circles that make the middle of the flower. I didn’t intend for the inflatable to turn out so large, but I do like the surprising and comical nature of the size. The face is a little bit scarier than I intended, but the sewing of the eye circles went a lot better in this version.
