Yes, yes. I know, but these are some decorations that I made for my steampunk themed birthday party this past weekend and I figured that no one would complain if I put the tutorial here.
So how this came about was quite by accident. I was on the hunt for a way to create an airship piñata without making one from scratch, but I could not find ready made football piñatas anywhere (which is odd here in Florida in the middle of football season). What I did find were these football paper lanterns, so I figured that I could just make hanging decorations instead!
Now I only bought one pack of these, but if I had more time I would have gotten more because they are the perfect size and easy to paint and manipulate. Also the cardboard packaging that came with them was perfect for wings (or anything else you can imagine).
So after much brainstorming I decided to combine two of the footballs into one super airship. I used masking tape to tape it all together and it works pretty well for the most part. The only problem I ran into with it was that some of the edges didn't want to stay down and had to be firmly pressed down a lot and caked on with paint to keep in place. Now I'm sure a different solution would work better but these were being hung from the ceiling where you can't get a close look at them and I had a very limited time frame to get them done. Now I used the cardboard packaging for fins of the airship and cut them out to the right size and use a lot of tape to make sure they stayed on.
As you can see I used the metal wiring inside each lantern as a further step to secure the two lanterns to each other.
Now this is the part that was part luck part making up on the spot (well more so than the rest...) I was able to use the cardboard roll of some use up wrapping paper as the rockets on the other airship. I tried using the template of the curve from the last airship to create the curves needed for the rockets but the two ships had slightly different curves and had to create a new one for the rockets.
I wanted to make sure that I covered every seem with tape so that there would be no holes in the final products. So the footballs were slowly being entirely covered with tape.
Ok so I wanted to make some kind of basket for the longer one and wanted to make it the easiest way possible. What I ended up using was the leftover bit of cardboard roll from the rockets. I just cut angles out of either side and taped it into a triangle type shape. It wasn't a perfect shape but it had an interesting look that just felt right.
Using more tape (the entire thing was made of tape... I was on a time crunch) I was miraculously able to stick the basket to the body of the airship.
This was my set up for painting since I didn't want to leave the AC of my house. As you can see both ships have been painted and have details painted onto them.
The final step that I did was to add an aged look to them as if they were real ships. I just added a darker shade of gray and lightly brushed it to places that would naturally darken on each ship. This is how it looked on the bigger one.
And here you go! The final products. Both ships before I hung them up with basic twine. (Since it was a steampunk theme I decided to go with the visible line to have them like decorations, but fishing line could also be used to make them appear to be real mini ships floating around.)
Now the cool thing with these is that there pretty much are no limits to what you can do to them. As long as what you add isn't heavy enough to tear apart the paper then you are fine. You can add propellers, hanging baskets with rope or wire, moving pieces... it's all up to you. I know that I will definitely be playing around with more ideas for these when I have more time and an excuse to make them. I shall keep you posted on the various outcomes.
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