hi i'm jim harden i'm a balloon twister and i'm here today to tell you how to blow up a balloon to make balloon animals or balloon crafts now there are basically two different ways that you can blow up a balloon one of them is by using your mouth which i do not recommend because there's a lot of danger if you do that first of all when they manufacture these balloons they put a powder on the inside of it and when you put these in your mouth over time i'm not quite sure what that will do to you second if you are blowing up the balloon and you happen to get a bad one and it pops while you're blowing it up it could come back and hit your eye or in the face and you really don't want to do that if you're bound to determine to know how to blow up a balloon using your mouth this is a proper procedure first you take the balloon and you stretch it you hold it in your left hand by the nozzle and the other end with your right hand and you give it a good stretch now you don't have to stretch it a lot of times a lot of guys will stretch it a lot you don't really have to then you place the balloon between your ring finger and your middle finger here and you take the nozzle of the balloon and you place it behind your teeth now you don't want to bite down on it because none of the air will go into the balloon if you do that and as you blow into the balloon you have to cut your mouth over your cheeks otherwise your cheeks are going to blow up you're going to look like a funny little squirrel and after a while that could do damage to your cheeks now i never do this but that's the proper way to do it when you put the balloon in your mouth and you're ready to blow it up yeah you have to this is kind of a mind over matter thing you have to focus on putting that air into that balloon and you can blow it up but that's how you blow it up by hand by your mouth now another method is by using a pump which is what i recommend now i have several different types of pumps basically all you do is you roll the end of the balloon over the end of the pump pump air into it now this particular pump pumps air as it's going in and as it's coming out which makes it nice this is the pump i use to blow up most of the rest of my balloons now there are different styles of pumps this is the same type of pump this pump as you push in it fills it up now it is a bigger pump there's more volume in this pump but it takes twice as many strokes now i have a third pump here it's a little smaller one now this one it has hardly any volume you have to really do a lot of pumping to get the balloon filled up but if you just have a few balloons in your pocket you're not going to make a lot of balloons you don't want to carry around something big and bulky this is the way to go also if you are using the 160s the smaller diameter balloon then you want to have one of these pumps because it's the only one that will actually fit in the nozzle of that smaller diameter balloon to blow it up i'm jim harden and that's how you blow up balloons to make balloon animals