Balloon printing test

Okay, so for Lowlands festival a good friend of mine (the one that will be helping me on the festival) suggested selling balloons. Not just any balloons but ones with lights in and printed with my own designs. Can you imagine how cool they would look when it's getting dark!?!

So, getting my hands on the light up balloons is not an issue. The printing on the other hand is proving to be a bit of a challenge. It's too expensive to get a company to do it so I'm trying to find a way of printing them myself. I would like to do them all before hand so really I want to print them when they're still deflated. I've searched around the web to look for ideas and ways of printing them. It's going to be tricky!

My first idea was to do a screenprint on them but that means I have to half inflate them and that's a nono. It won't work with the light in the balloon. Let alone trying to get the screenprint smoothly onto a flexible curved shape... So I've tested some other things last night. With paint and permanent markers and even stamps and ink (they really didn't work!). Here are the results of a trial and error evening. None of it really works (or at least not to my little miss perfectionist standards ;-). So I've come to the conclusion that we've got to decorate them when they're completely inflated, there and then on the spot. That would be much fun to! I do still need to figure out how we can do it with minimum effort and materials... I'm thinking of making stamps of my designs and use paint to stamp them on the balloon. Anyone any other suggestions?

The orange one looks quite good, I kind of like it but it's just not what I had in mind...

Interested in some more balloon decorating inspiration? Have a look at my Pinterest board.