Inspirations

There is lots of wasted material when it comes to packaging, so we were inspired by our Cloudy Day recipe to create a packing material. Since we couldn’t find any molds in the shape of peanuts, we created packing ducks!

Materials

• One batch of our Cloudy Day recipe biofoam
• A mold of any shape

Process

Whip up a batch of the Cloudy Day biofoam and quickly pour into a mold of your choosing. Let it sit for at least 5 days as the water evaporates. Below are snapshots of our packing ducks over time. You can see that the material shrinks drastically as it dries.

Here’s our dried out packing ducks. They are completely rigid because the recipe doesn’t include any glycerin. We used a knife to clean up the edges of our ducks.

Final Product

Lessons Learned

We think that this was a pretty successful application of this material. Although we never tested how well the packing ducks were in protecting a fragile item in a box during travel, the vision was there! The foam didn’t decompose or change over time but putting it under the bell jar, away from germs and sticky hands, may have helped with that. Testing the potential of the foam packing ducks to protect something in packaging would be a logical next step.

Another thing to keep in mind is to not underestimate how much the material shrinks while drying.