Well Elvis is standing tall but at a bit of an angle I must admit. The air pressure inside is much grater than I had anticipated and the base is actually lifting him off the ground. The heads will need to be tethered if there is going to be any wind.

I will add D-rings to the back and cheeks as well as a series around the bottom edge to anchor them to the yet to be made bases. Oh joy more work... I'll have to get Joe to do it!

Moai number two goes together after a few false starts. I took the D-rigs off of the pumpkins and found some more small ones in my leather kit. I covered the cotton tape in strips of gold nylon to help them blend in and reinforce the D-ring placements.

Moai #2 inflates even better than #1! We'll call him Chris.

Now I just need to rebuild Elvis to add the D-rings to him.

Productivity!

Since I spent the last few days focused on other projects I really needed to get something done today. Luckily I had lots of help! Irk, Smokin'Joe and the Stickmann joined my lovely wife Maya and me for the big push.

Our pile of supplies:

Note the roll of nylon and the roll of paper that will make up the marker. Along with this is the box of the lawn pumpkin that is giving its life for art... much like all of the real pumpkins that have been sacrificed to my artistic whims over the years.

First I will need to clean up and finish the marker.

Then the plan is to roll out 4 layers of fabric to reduce the number of cuts we need to make.

The fabric proved to be a bit of a hassle. The edges refused to lie flat. To remedy this I had to rough cut each piece before smoothing out the next one.

We used pins and staples along the edges to control the fabric.

Then they were handed off to Irk for finish cutting on the cutting table.

Meanwhile Joe showed the lawn ornaments who was boss.

We plan to reuse the base section of orange fabric as the actual screws that held the base together were rusted. It would just be easier to sew the new fabric to the existing bits. We will also use the zippers because there was no one to stop us! We're crazy mad like that.

Stickmann was assembling our paper reference model

and wrangling fabric and tools, which saved me from a lot of moving about.

Here you can see all of the pieces cut and ready for sewing:

Piece by piece the head was formed.

I started with the nose because I knew this would be the focus. The nose would need to have its edge defined to prevent it from looking like it got into a fight. To accomplish this we added a nose gore behind the actual nose.

Sickmann and Irk cut diamond shapes into to allow airflow but retain strength. Ultimately this piece would define the shape of the nose and eye... at least that was the idea.


At first I did the same seam twice, once for each head but for some strange reason I kept making mistakes on the second head and needed Irk to remove those seems.

Soon I decided to get one Moai finished and debugged before completing his brother.


When I finished the face I realized that I messed up on the shape for the Nose gore. Luckily Irk and Stick failed to follow my directions and somehow managed to leave me with just the right amount of space to correct my mistake. The gods were smiling on us! -or at least they would be as soon as I got these things finished.

I installed the zipper in the back seam before sewing the base to the Moai. After that was done I pulled the top thru the zipper and sewed the cap on.

It is time for the first test:

Success!

I give you Elvis!

Fabric

Now I'm really under the gun!

I needed to acquire fabric quickly and get home to work on this stuff. Since I have a rather small window to shop I would go where the selection is and not worry about finding the best deal. -assuming I could even find this fabric elsewhere

I had a number of choices in the color department but I was a little worried that rip stop nylon wouldn't hold the air well enough so I went with the only coated rip stop they had... Metallic Gold! This will be the Elvis of Moai!

Actually the gold should work out well. There is a concern that the more sensible colors would fade into the stage, as it is all black and gray with a blue sky behind it.

I also grabbed a few yards of a brown rip stop to act as shadowing for the nose and eyes.

I was out the door in record time -for me- and spent under $80 for 18 yards.

Pattern Part 2

Before I slapped down cash for fabric I want to know how much I actually need. Time is the big issue at this point so I'm willing to spend a bit of money to save a bit of time.

I couldn't find any silicon coated nylon but I do know of a place that has a selection of rip-stop. Michael Levine's in Downtown LA (near work) has a pile at $4 a yard. I don't have time to go on safari so this will have to do.

To save money I spend a bit of time on the computer laying out potential cut patterns. These are known as markers in the fashion industry and I figure I saved a few yards and lots of potential stress by working this out in advance. 18 yards would give me plenty of fabric to build two Moai.

The Pattern

Now that the pattern was secured it was time for the next hurdle. The sculpt was done in 1:12 scale. Each inch equaled a foot. This needed to get much larger.

I had a few options:
Manually scale the pattern up -yeah right
Use a computer to do the heavy lifting. Bingo!

Now the question is: Do I use a home scanner and a graphics program to scale the pattern or capitalize on some free time at work? I went with the work option as my students were taking tests. I digitized the patterns into the computer and scaled them up 200% in the pattern design software before truing the seams.

This took a few trail runs to finesse the pattern but once the corners were square and the seams matched I printed out a paper model to test the look. After the first paper model I realized I need more definition in the mouth and patterned a larger lower lip. All of the angles were set to be very sharp. This was to compensate for the drastically swelled look of the future inflatable.

The second pass was created in paper. At this point the model is in 1:6 scale. You can also see the lines drawn for additional seams in the full-scale model.

The Sculpt

As with all things... you gotta start somewhere. For this project there were a couple of sketches but I realized that the illustrations were more complex than what I needed. This design was going to need to be quite simple if I wanted any hope of success. So I turned to the massive pile of oil based sculpting clay I've had for years.

Since I knew this design would be symmetrical I could skip the detail on one side.

From here I had a decision to make. I needed to turn this into a paper pattern. Traditionally one just wraps the form in masking tape and then slice the tape on the potential seams. However I had a problem. I used clay because I didn't want to sculpt in plaster. Tape doesn't stick to clay. I could try wrapping the clay in a plastic bag and tape that but we were in a massive heat wave and the clay was less than firm.

My solution: shove the sculpt into the freezer and take a break. This proved to be mostly pointless. When I took the clay out it immediately started to condense moisture. Damn humidity! When I wrapped it in plastic the plastic immediately began to sweat. I called it quits for the night.

After rolling about in the sweltering heat for a few hours I realized sleep was not on the menu. Despite needing to be up early for work I crawled out of bed with a new plan. I'll take tracing paper and pin it to the clay form. Bit by bit I worked the paper around the clay and created my pattern.

I took the small pieces of tracing paper and taped them to a piece of pattern paper. With the pattern secured I was ready to get it on the computer.

The Plan

So here we go...

• Make two inflatable Moai -Easter Island style heads- using nylon fabric and the two fan basses I already have sitting in storage.
  
• Create a pattern in small scale from paper trying to anticipate what will happen when we fill it with air and make it look like it suffered from a peanut allergy. -sorry G$-
  
• Get the pattern into a computer to scale up to about 8ft tall
  
• Find usable fabric and start cutting
  
• Sew...sew like the wind!
  
• Cross fingers and hope it doesn't look totally lame.

Actually I should mention that step one is actually procrastinate for as long as possible until panic sets in. Panic is a great motivator and is often overlooked in most DIY books. Deadlines are essential for this... well partially essential. The 'line' part isn't as important as the 'dead' is.

Parts cost:

Cheesy Halloween lawn decoration
$35.00 - can be found much cheaper now.

Fabric - I ended up using a coated rip stop nylon. Usually these are made with silicon coated nylon but I didn't manage to find that in time.
$4.00 per yard 18yds total


8yds for base color -for each Moai


1yd for contrast -for each Moai

Thread - on sale four for a buck!
Assorted D rings and straps scavenged from other projects

The paper for the patterns was recycled from work.