Czymbor restricts herself to only ten balloons for each Pokémon.

By Mary Windsor, Staff Writer

Published in print Mar. 17, 2015

Loop twist, lock twist, and ear twist are probably terms you’ve never heard of before. Neither had Sam Inez Czymbor, until five years ago. Most students have part-time jobs aside from going to school, whether it’s for extra money or to make rent. It’s convenient to find a job near campus as a server or at local bar, but that’s not how Czymbor worked her way through college and grad school.

Czymbor, a UNCG graduate student alum, worked as a frozen yogurt server throughout high school, but was laid off during the off-season. She found herself jobless during the winter months.

She began searching for jobs in her area, and through a Craigslist Ad found an opening for balloon artists, the only requirement being that applicants have a good, people-friendly personality. She had no experience with twisting but thought she should give it a try, soon forgetting she even applied when they didn’t respond for months.

Balloon Distractions, the company that hired her, trained her through Skype calls, even though her trainer lived only three hours away from her at the time. She was their first successful trainee to be taught how to twist through a Skype call instead of a hands-on approach.

“They took about two weeks to train me, and then it’s sink or swim with your first event. For the first three events, it was terrifying,” said Cyzmbor.

It took her about eight months before she became comfortable with improvising her balloon creations, and a year and half before she starting creating large sculptures with the balloons.

“Easy to learn, hard to master,” she said. “But I don’t consider myself a master at all.”

When she does events, they are mostly at family restaurants, private parties, and small-town festivals. Coffeeology hired her to twist in the street during Tate St. Festival in the Fall of her first year attending UNCG’s Graduate program.

“I try to maintain conversation while twisting. When I was learning how to be a balloon artist, they told me not to twist like a mute robot. So I had to learn how to twist and talk. I do get the occasional penis joke,” she laughs. “They mostly just ask how I got into learning the craft of twisting balloons.”

She was recently featured in a Buzzfeed article highlighting her challenge for this year, which is to twist all 151 of the original Pokémon in 151 days. This challenge didn’t come about as one might think.

“My new years resolution this year was to create, use, and come to understand Instagram,” Czymbor explained. “But I knew I would ignore it and wouldn’t keep up with it if I didn’t have a reason to use it. So to make it fun for myself, I would do a balloon-twisting thing every day.”

One of her trainees at the time asked her how someone that was new to balloon twisting could learn how to make cool shapes, which gave her the idea to start creating Pokémon figures out of balloons for her Instagram.

She limits herself to ten or less balloons per figure, since that is the average she would use per person if she were working an event at a restaurant and that is how many she uses to train her trainees.

Her daily goal is to create and post one Pokémon a day, and Instagram is her accountability partner, having 10k followers that keep her on track. She’s creating the Pokémon in order and has so far completed 72 of the 151.    

Follow Inëz on Instagram here.

“The challenge ends on June 1, because I started on January 2. I started a day late on my New Years resolution,” she laughs. “I think the fact that I do one a day every day was a really good idea and keeps me on schedule. I’ve already made my favorite Pokémon, actually. It was my first: Bulbasaur. But I’m really nervous about certain ones. I’m dreading Grimer, Muk, and Ditto because they’re all these amorphous blobs which are hard to sculpt out of balloons.”

There are days when she doesn’t want to make a Pokémon, especially after a rough day at work or if she just can’t get one right the way she wants it.

“I ask myself, why am I doing this to myself? This is stupid! But at the end of the day, when I’m done with it, I’m so happy with it. It’s very worth it.”