Hot air balloon Easter project.

Last Easter I made Marcus a Easter bunny basket.  He liked it last year when the Easter bunny gave it to him.  He liked it even more this year when we took it out of storage.  It has been in his room ever since.  He filled it with toys and carries it around the room.  The poor bunny tail has fallen off but at some point I will fix it but it is fine for the now.  At least I know where the tail still is at, it will go back on at some time. 

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After last years success I decided that I wanted to have another go at creating an Easter surprise for my little guy. This year my focus is a hot air balloon basket.  I started the project out by looking at pinterest for help and surprisingly there was not actually any projects that showed how any one made them but there were some pictures of projects people had made.  By looking at the projects I could pretty much see that most people made them out of either a balloon or a Chinese lantern.  I choose to opt with the lantern because it should last longer (hopefully).  Also it looks like most people used either small buckets or baskets for the actual hot air balloon basket.  With those as the suggestions I went in search of baskets and Chinese lanterns.  I ended finding some at Party City (lanterns) and Target (baskets).  I didn't buy any other supplies because I figured I had what I needed at home.

I planned ahead a bit as well and got a few of each- this way I could do a trial run
 so I could perfect it before Easter.

I completed my trial run last here are the supplies I used:

• 10" Chinese lantern
• small wooden basket
• wooden kitchen skewers (like you use in Kabobs)
• Small piece of material to cover up the hole at the top of the Chinese lantern
• pipe cleaners
• hot glue gun & glue sticks
• regular craft glue
• additional tools were limited to a cutting tool I used to snip the skewers and to remove the basket handle.  I also used scissors to cut the fabric for the balloon.

I learned  a lot during this trial run and I will hopefully be much better at it later in the week when we do it for real. Here is who I did it:

1.  I started by removing the handle fro the small baskets-  I actually used a wire clipper to do that and it came right out.  
2. I built the Chinese lantern.  This gave me a time to actually evaluate the size of the lantern verse the size of the basket.  I actually thought I did pretty good with my size guess.
3. The next step was to figure out how to assemble the project.  I found the hot glue gun and trimmed the wooden skewers down to size and started gluing  This actually my first mistake of the day.  When I make the next one of theses I will do all of the alternations on the "balloon" before attaching it to the basket.  By attaching it so early it made things a lot more difficult later on.
4. I glued all of the skewers into the basket first and then played with them until I decided that the best place for the skewers was inside the "balloon" and so I glued them there.  I did run into another problem when I ran out of normal glue sticks and had to use glitter glue-  yuck.  I already bought some to do the next version.
5. Once the sticks were attached to the basket I played around with them until I figured out what I wanted to do to attach them to the top.  I actually decided to stick in into the bottom hole of the lantern and I glued them into place.
6. No in a less than intelligent manner I decided to cover the hole at the top of the lantern,  In the future this will be one of the first things I do because it would have been much easier if I still could have stuck my hand inside but it was blocked by the skewer.  Anyway I just used a piece of felt and glued it from the inside.
7. On late minute thought I had was to create some type skirt for the bottom of the balloon.  Once again I looked around the house and found some ribbon I had floating around.  It worked pretty good and I was happy with the outcome.  I used the hot glue gone to stick it on.
8. All done.... at least I thought I was.....

This is what it looked like when I finished the project!

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I brought it upstairs to show Luke and when I was walking one of my skewers popped free of the basket.  At this point I knew that I needed to reinforce-  after a short search for supplies I found the pipe cleaners and reinforced all of the corners.

And this is what it looked like when I was all done!  I think it pretty much rocks and that Marcus is going to love it!

This was actually a trial run.  I ordered larger Chinese lanterns online (this is a 10" and I ordered 16" and 20") and they should be here in time for Easter.    I will be able to put a much bigger basket under them.  I am so excited to get them make and how that I did a trial run the next version should look even better.  I will post pictures of them when they are done.