Week 13: Inflatables!!




It's wildcard week, and we split into smaller groups to work on weird projects! Me and Jeremy joined the inflatables group, which uses big sewn-together sheets of plastic along with air blowers to create great soft sculptures.


Our idea is based on the Pokemon Corsola, a super-cute coral creature with spikes and a circular body. We wanted to make a huge inflatable version of corsola that we could wave around and display in our dorm hall. We first began by doing some super rough sketches and brainstorming how to flattern this shape into 2D parts that could be sewn together.


The first part was how to make a sphere. There's no perfect way to flatten a sphere, but the great thing about inflatables is you only really need to approximate the shape and the air pressure will automatically smooth out most errors. Taking inspiration from how globes are projected in 2D, we creates four leaf-looking shapes out of paper and assembled a test piece to see if the idea could work.


We were reasonable happy with the test, so it was time to move on to the plastic sheets! We drew a design on a sheet folded over itself six times, then cut it out once, leaving us with six identical leaf pieces. We then got on the sewing machines and started piecing everything together.

The sewing machine itself was quite an adventure, as neither of us had really every used one for real before. The setup process is straightforward but was very confusing at first. Basically, you first thread the spool of thread across the machine, pulling the wire through a couple of loops, a tension system, and a metal rod that moves up and down. Then, a second spool of thread is put in the bottom of the machine, called a bobbin. The machine is then manually operated a few times to hook the two thread together with the needle.

The machine uses a step pedal, and the tracks automatically pull the cloth through the machine, so it feels very satisfying to actually pull of a nice seam! Many times, however, I had trouble aligning the two pieces together, especially as more sheets added to the complexity. So a bunch of the seams ended up with very wiggly sewing. The great thing about our design, at least, is that when we turn the thing inside-out, none of the seams are visible anyways!


Inflating the sphere! More like a pumpkin, in practice.


Finally, we also tried adding a spike to the body by using a triangle of plastic wrapped up into a cone. This was very tricky to sew onto the body, since we had to sew a very small tight circle without overlapping any of the layers. We also had to make sure to put an air vent at the end of the cone, otherwise the pressure built up and ripped our seams off. But the structure is surprisingly stable and definitely fun to play around with!