Hot Air balloon

The kit consists of 5 pages of parts, 30 parts in total. The balloon is made of four sub-assemblies, and each has six "ellipse like" sections that give the balloon its shape when rounded and glued. Each ellipse has gluing tabs extending from it, and these are to be glued under the adjacent ellipse. I cut away those tabs and replaced them with gluing strips from regular (80g) paper to give a smooth surface to the balloon.

I do not know if it made a great difference, but it almost doubled the number of parts, with 24 gluing strips added. I traced the edge of one slice on the paper, completed the shape to about 4mm width, scanned it, and copied and pasted it until I had 24 strips and than printed two sheets as seen in the picture. I painted the gluing strips, because I wanted to paint the inner side of the balloon with the same outer colors, but, due to some technical difficulties, I dropped the whole idea.

As I added more "slices" to the balloon, it curled and became more difficult to handle, especially when gluing one quarter of the balloon to the next. Long fingers became a very valuable tool.

The rest of the parts and the assembled basket are shown here.

These are side and bottom views of the completed balloon. Note that there is no internal support.

Top view

Here is the balloon inside the hanger. And, finally, I let it go....