At her home office in Valley Cottage, Laurie Straus is doing wondrous things with her hands as we talk. The room smells faintly ”” well, a bit more than faintly ”” like the rubber balloons you blew up as a kid, then watched them shrivel into premature old age or jumped when they popped.
Her office is equipped with precisely calibrated, dual-nozzle air compression machines ”” business investments at $1,400 to $1,500 each ”” but Laurie Straus is using a simple hand pump to demonstrate her art ”” a rare, ephemeral art from which she has built a business, Confetti Party Decorating (her website is ConfettiPartyDecor.com). Her design-and-build business and the industry accolades for her work are, well, ballooning.
She briskly pumps life into latex of various lengths as we watch. Leaning into her work with an orchestra conductor”™s intensity and facial tics, she ties and twists and presses and slides and ”” encore! ”” a six-petaled flower on a long green stem emerges. Then a black-tipped yellow balloon becomes the head of a bumble bee. Deftly she ties on a pair of bowed gossamer wings. With a tweak or two, the latex creation could serve too as a mosquito. That”™s the easy stuff for Laurie Straus.
“I don”™t think there”™s a day that goes by that I don”™t touch a balloon,” she says. “I like all aspects of it.”
She describes herself as both a graphic designer and a balloon artist. She worked at Manhattan advertising and design firms and Adweek magazine before moving to Rockland County 25 years ago. “That commute was just a bugger,” says Straus, who can inflate and twist balloons and make of them just about any bug a customer wants. Or an octopus with floating airborne limbs, like the one she did with an all-balloon yellow submarine for a client”™s party at South Street Seaport.
For a time the graphic designer in suburbia worked closer to home at Lillian Vernon in Westchester County. After the birth of her second child, “I decided I wanted to be a stay-at-home mom,” she says. She started her own business, Elless Design Inc., carving out a niche with nonprofits in Rockland County that “couldn”™t afford the big agencies,” she says.
That led her into designing centerpieces for friends”™ parties. For her oldest son”™s bar mitzvah, she created a centerpiece and paid a woman to add balloons to the composition. The balloons stole the show.
“I said, wow! It was so cool to walk into the room ”“ how it transformed the room,” she says. Another professional balloon artist ”” there are not many of them, though they”™re found worldwide ”” was about to be born.
A woman in Chestnut Ridge offered to sell her balloon business to the graphic designer in Valley Cottage. Doing research at balloonhq.com, a professional and educational resource site for the artist subculture and “really amazing community of people” she now inhabits, Straus declined the sale offer because “I couldn”™t invest that much money until I realized just what this is.”
So she traveled to New Jersey for her first “balloon jam” ”” a gathering of artists sharing not guitar riffs or newly penned poems, but their new, twisted creations with latex balloons.
“I couldn”™t believe what I was seeing at that jam,” she says. “I brought with me a bag of balloons and a hand pump and just kind of sat there with my mouth open. These balloon artists will push their balloons and figure out different ways to use them ”“ really innovative how they figure out how they can use the balloons” in the service of their art. “Each area of the country, they all have their own little twister jams,” she says.
“Someone showed me how to make a six-petal flower and they showed me how to make a basket ”” not that I could come home and replicate it.” With much practice, she became proficient.
The “twisters” she met at jams ”“ there are “twisters” and there are “stackers” or “decorators” in the segmented world of balloon art, and “the two don”™t mingle much,” says Straus ”” advised her to visit Balloon Manor in Rochester. It”™s an annual art installation organized by a Buffalo couple whose company, Airigami, is dedicated to “the fine art of folding air in latex containers,” according to their website.
In late February, she joined about 75 fellow artists in building “Under the Sea,” a 45,000-balloon sculpture that included a 20-foot sailing ship “complete with all the rigging.” Straus, who is both a twister and a decorator, designed a very large ocean-floor oyster shell with exposed pearl.
Last year at Balloon Manor, she joined in building “Jack and the Beanstalk,” a five-story, 55,000-balloon installation that weighed 200 pounds.
“It”™s just a really awesome experience to be totally immersed in balloons for four days,” she says.
Straus”™ standing among balloon artists rose greatly earlier in February, when she was named Designer of the Year for three compositions she designed and built with her team at Float, a national balloon decorators”™ convention in St. Louis. Her “piece de resistance” was a 10-foot-by 10-foot-by-13-foot balloon sculpture depicting the nursery tale “The Old Woman in a Shoe,” complete with bratty kids and a harried mother with gray braided balloon hair. Straus says she spent nine months planning her creation.
“It”™s really just thinking outside the box, thinking different things that can be done,” she says. Was there a cash prize for the Designer of the Year? The artist shakes her head. “Just a title.” She awaits her award”™s arrival in Valley Cottage.
“For me to sell something like that would be awesome,” she says. “That”™s probably a $15,000 job, easily.”
Back home, Straus is paid to transform bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs, birthday parties, weddings ”” “the first party I did was my brother”™s”™ wedding” ”” school and nonprofits”™ fundraisers, car-dealership grand openings and corporate events with her balloon installations. “I”™d love to do more corporate work,” she says.
“The centerpieces go from $30 up to $150. Fifty-five dollars to $60 gets you a very elegant centerpiece. It can be elegant, it can be fun.”
When pricing her work for clients, “I can”™t tell you how many times I”™ve heard, ”˜It”™s just a balloon.”™ It”™s beyond that. It”™s the experience, the creativity. ”¦ It is just a balloon, until you put your artistry in it.”
Her brief-lived artistic creations often have a useful afterlife.
“Latex balloons are 100 percent biodegradable,” she says. “They decompose at the rate of an oak leaf, so they”™re actually very environmentally friendly.”
“A lot of times after a party, I”™ll throw them out in my garden in my compost.”
