Year in review

It is December. A time to look back at what we’ve done over the last year. You’re probably as busy as we are right now, so rather than bog you down with a ton of stuff, we’ll just hit some highlights that we never got around to blog about this year.

A bright idea at Maker Faire Rochester

When talking “highlights”, how can you go wrong talking about, well, “lights”?

Let’s turn on some lights.

We love interacting with the public. Sure, we love to show off, making elaborate creations ourselves, but it’s far more fun for us when attendees at an event can be part of the creation. And still more fun when everyone can interact with the completed sculpture.

This sculpture at Maker Faire Rochester in November checked all boxes. Our six-foot, 7500 lumen balloon light bulb, powered by a couple of ten-foot balloon batteries, and activated by a giant balloon switch, lit up our small part of the Rochester Convention Center. Maker Faire attendees helped build the giant batteries while Airigami crew made the bulb, switch, and handled the wiring. On completion, many of the participants came back to try the switch themselves.

See the sculpture being built by hundreds of community members.

Maker Faire Bay Area

We also made an appearance at this year’s Maker Faire at Mare Island in Vallejo, CA. The nautical theme of this year’s faire in an old naval shipyard gave us a great opportunity to do something big with a rather small and often overlooked subject, a glaucus, or blue dragon.

Murray takes flight

Over the summer, when the weather was much warmer, we had a little outdoor adventure with Murray, the spokesmastodon of the Rochester Museum and Science Center. We had a blast(off) when we were tasked with getting Murray into the air using nothing but helium balloons. Kids of all ages played with a single helium balloon and various weights to try to predict the number of balloons that would ultimately be needed for the job.

Murray the mastodon became Murray the mathtodon as kids used him to help with their calculations. Variations in the way balloons were inflated and the slow loss of helium from balloons throughout the day contributed to some differences between calculations and the final result, making it more fun to do the final launch. And then even further fun and adventure was had as things went, well, a bit off from the plan.

All balloons and mastodons lifted into the air were tethered at all times. No mastodons were harmed during the making of this video.

Everyone loves a parade

The Queen of Hearts made an appearance this summer at the Rochester Pride Parade. And for this holiday season, we just created a Charlie in the Box for a holiday parade in Ransomville, NY. We usually try keep our work indoors where it will last longer. But what can we say? We’re suckers for a parade. And if Macy’s can do it, why can’t we?