How To Make An Origami Balloon

My name is Origami Mark, and you can contact me on my website which is http://www.origamimark.co.

uk/. In this session, I'm going to show you how to make an origami balloon, with this piece of paper here, square, red on one side, yellow on the other. I'm going to make a red balloon, so we have yellow up.

Fold the model of paper in half diagonally. Fold it diagonally again. Open the paper up and we see we have three mountain folds and one valley fold.

Change the valley fold into a mountain fold. Pinch the model together with the point in the center and we form the balloon base. With the ball base, we have one point at the top, which is the center of the paper originally.

Down at the bottom, we have the raw edges which were the sides of the paper, and we have points obviously at the left and the right, one at each side. We take one of the points, I'm taking the right-top hand one, and putting it to the center, like that. Repeat for the other four.

We now have a little square with two points here, two points here, and some points here and here, to the right and left side. Take the right hand top point and fold it to the center. You can get to the center by just pushing the top point down and making it pinch if you're not sure where the center goes.

Where the pinch lies is the center, where you want to fold to, so we fold the right hand point to the center. Do the same on the left hand side, and repeat on the other side of the model. Now, we have a lozenge with a sealed bottom, no spare loose edges, and at the top, some points that are sticking out.

Take the right top-hand point and fold it back over the triangle you just made by folding to the center, then fold that point again into the center, and you can then tuck that point that you just made into this little pocket and it disappears. And that's the little pocket that we're going to do on the left hand side. So go back over itself, into the center, and put it in the pocket.

Repeat on the other side for both points. There we have our balloon almost finished. What we do next is the top point folds down, and fold it back on itself again, so we have a just a bit of a hinge.

Similarly, the other end, which is much harder because there's much more paper there. And holding the paper by opposite flanges like this, there's a hole there which allows you to inflate your balloon. Anyways, there we have an origami balloon.