It starts with a wedding. The bride wants pink inflatable hearts for her reception. The ceremony and the reception will be held in a legendary San Francisco hotel. The bride also loves to design events, and I hear she loves props. This one will be fun.

I haven’t made any flying hearts yet. I have made two heart costumes, but they’re different. They’re meant to be quick, simple, and destructible. I don’t worry about making smooth curves with a costume, and because there is a person inside, the shape is constantly distorting anyway. The close-up details are not that important. I have a lot of design flexibility.

An elegant wedding requires something else, though, something more . . . elegant. Nor will this will not be my normal audience. Although there will be dance music, I doubt it will be techno, and I would be surprised to see fire dancers, but I can be certain that the room will need to be quiet at times, and my normal fans make too much noise to go unnoticed. I will need to find quieter fans.

The design should also match the occasion. I want a classic heart, with smooth lines and just the right amount of curve. These will be internally illuminated, so I want the seaming to be minimal. Seams are more obvious when lit from inside, but smooth curves require many seams. Under different circumstances, I would use the seaming to my advantage and make panels of contrasting colors, but this design needs to be more classic.

Luckily, about that time, I got two gigs for Valentine’s parties, and they both wanted hearts. The wedding was still over a month away, and with these two parties, I now had an opportunity to work out the design ahead of time, and test them in a real world setting. I originally thought I would use the same hearts for the parties that I would for the wedding, but as I worked on the pattern, I realized that I wanted to make many different styles of hearts. It was hard to choose one. I became a little obsessed with hearts for a while. I had never stopped to think much about heart shapes before, but I soon found there are a variety of heart shapes out there. The more I thought about shape, the more I wanted to make multiple designs. I saw a lot of potential possibilities. I realized I could fill a room with hearts, and they could all be different, while still being simply hearts.

I started with a shape I liked, and worked out a simple 3-panel model. It turned out better than I expected, but it was still too rough. I would need to soften the curves.

Next I designed a 5-panel version. The two new panels provided an opportunity to add contrasting colors. It was then that I decided that these particular hearts would not be used for the wedding; I would use these to test the pattern, but I would add some color and make them more my style. Even if the pattern wasn’t smooth enough for the wedding, I would still be able to use them for other parties for sure.

I took the 5 panel design, and added 4 more panels, just for style. This one worked, for the most part. The upper-outer curves were smoother, but the long-side edges curved in too much and caused a bit of pucker. Andrew calls it the Care Bear heart.

These first two hearts were 5’ high, which is what I need for the wedding, but one of these Valentine’s events required a larger heart that was to be placed on the main stage. For the past couple of years, Joegh has been bugging me to make a spiky heart, and this time, I agreed.

I Increased the size to 8’, added some fullness to the bottom half of the heart, did some fiddling to the edge seams, and added twelve 17” spikes. It has been dubbed Love Hurts by nearly everyone who’s seen it.

Susan thinks it looks like a monster face as it deflates. I think it needs more more spikes. Either way, it's big!

I am now ready for the wedding.

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