Yahoo News South Holland balloon artists to lead design work at Big Balloon Build to England
It’s been five years since South Holland resident Tiasha Echols first picked up a tube of latex, filled it with air and began twisting it into art. Now, Echols and her business partner, Saundra Woods, are 4,000 miles from home in Guildford, England, participating in the prestigious, globally recognized Big Balloon Build.
It’s their second year at the Balloon Build, and this time Echols is a design lead, charged with leading a team through the process of recreating London’s Palladium Theater.
“It has been awesome,” said Echols. “This entire gymnasium will be filled with balloons.”
From Tuesday to Friday, 75 of celebrated professional balloon artists from around the world will pack into the athletic center of the Charterhouse School and recreate famous sights and scenes around the world using 125,000 perfectly placed balloons.
Echols, Woods and their team is tasked with building the famous white-stone columns of the Palladium, a theater in London that played host to acts such as The Beatles, The Rolling Stones, Frank Sinatra and Bob Dylan.
Back home in South Holland, Echols and Woods have a balloon making business aptly named The Balloon Queens, which grew in popularity during the pandemic. They were concerned that once COVID-19 subsided business might slow down. Many customers bought balloons as they tried to transform their living rooms and backyards into makeshift party environments.
But people kept coming even in 2022 and 2023.
“We were never not busy,” said Echols. “We were at 1,700 square feet. We upgraded to 3,200 square feet because we had just run out of space.”
As they grew their business and became more and more a part of the far-reaching balloon community, Echols and Woods learned about the Big Balloon Build, which invites some of the most talented professional balloon artists around the world to participate in a variety of events based in the U.S. and beyond.
When the artists are done building their designs, people pay tickets to walk through the exhibit and corporations pay to advertise their businesses with the proceeds going to a variety of charities. So far, the build has raised $550,000 and 18,000 pounds of canned food for a variety of charities, according to its GoFundMe page.
“We definitely have some South Holland Pride,” said South Holland Mayor Don A. DeGraff. “The artistry involved in what they do is something like I’ve never seen before.”
