About 10 years ago, my family and I started a rubberband ball. We didn't buy the rubber bands. The rubber bands came to us holding our mail together, or were used to hold plastic produce containers closed when we left the grocery store. The idea came to us from my father-in-law who had started his own for similar reasons.
We added rubberbands to our ball for about 8 years +/-, and stopped when it got too big to stretch new rubberbands across it. I think it measured about 7" tall when we stopped adding them. It was pretty heavy, and it was something that kids and adults loved to look at and hold because it was amazingly large. The ball usually just sat on a small table top, but every now and then, my son would take it outside and bounce it on the street, and watch how it went in weird directions because it hit a bump in the asphalt. It was very unpredictable.
For the past 2 years I've been watching the ball start to fall apart. I've been picking up the small pieces of rubberbands as they fall off of it, and thowing them away. In the past few weeks, the ball has been starting to look REALLY interesting. Some bands are breaking and others not, so I decided it was time (or maybe past the time?) to start documenting it.
The picture above was taken today. The ball is 6.75" tall now. I'm going to try to take pictures of it as it continues to change, and I'll post it on my blog. Creating this ball started out as a silly thing, that turned into a bit of a science experiment. Now it's still a science experiment but it's also a self destructing work of art.
