Elastic Band Heroes

This instructable shows how to make your favorite characters or in this case heroes on the Rainbow Loom. For this particular instructable I will be showing you how to make a Rainbow Loom superman. I initially did this to repurpose the Rainbow Loom to make a neat keychain rather than the bracelets and such that it is intended for. Keep in mind that this instructable is not meant to be limited to the one thing I will be showing how to make, but is rather a template in which the real fun is creating your own designs based on the steps that I will cover. You will need one rainbow loom and several bands as well as a hook in order to complete this instructable.

Step 1: Plan Your Design

I find that it is often a good idea to get a good idea of what I'm going to do and how I'll do it, prior to diving right into a project. In this case, I printed off a couple rainbow loom templates to plan out my design. I found this to work really well, seeing as how if you make a mistake, you don't have to mess around with a bunch of elastics to fix the problem, and you can get a decent idea of how it will look. The first design is for the arms, while the second lays out the rest of the figure. I will add these pictures to the steps that they apply so that they can be easily viewed for reference. The colors of bands we will be using in this project are: Red, Blue, Yellow, Peach and Black.

Step 2: Make the Arms

For this project we are going to be using the bands in pairs for the most part unless otherwise specified. You will notice the design has numbers inside the spaces indicating how many bands should be placed on the two indicated pegs. To start you will need to go from top down following the pattern indicated in the design. Always make sure that as you put on the bands that they layer on top of the previous bands. Once you get to the last set of bands you will need one more band to act as a cap. Simply wrap it 3x around the last peg and then you are ready to start looping. To start your looping you will need to take your hook and pull up the 3 bands from below the cap and then loop them onto the previous peg. Continue to follow this until you need to loop the three band set. You will need to loop this over the disconnected pair of bands. Then finish looping normally. After this pull the arm off the pegs from top to bottom while making sure to keep track of the ends as they are loose. I would recommend putting a toothpick through them to store the arm for later as in the picture above. As you probably guessed you will have to do this twice.

Refer to the pictures if you encounter any confusion.

Step 3: Start Making the Body

In this step you will start to make the body of your figure. That last step was a fair bit of reading, but now that you know the basics and principals the rest is fairly repetitive. For the body what you need to know is that all the bands will be put on in pairs unless indicated with a "3" in the design. Furthermore when there are three sets of bands that converge onto one peg you will do the diagonals first and then the vertical except in the case of the shoulders where you will do those before the third set going into the chest. Other than that you need to follow the design until you have everything except the bands between the legs. Also do not add the bands that stretch over three pegs as we will be doing that in the next step. To confirm you have it right take a look at the pictures above. The bands between the legs will be used as leg extensions so that they are not so short. what you will do there is virtually the same as the arms with the two sets and then capping them off with a 3x twisted band. After that pull it off and then stretch the four band ends over the last peg. You will need to do this twice. This is also shown in the pictures if you are unclear.

Step 4: Looping the Body

To start this step we will put on the bands that go over three pegs to keep the figure together. To do this you will need to double a band over by crossing it over itself to increase its tightness. Do this for each indicated spot in the design and the pictures. except for the one with 1/2x marked next to it in the design, for this one, put on the band without crossing it over but on the third peg twist it and hook it onto the center peg. Again make sure to refer to the pictures to make sure you do it correctly. Next start looping the bands in the same way as with the arms straight up the vertical columns until about the waist area. You will then need to put on the arms. You will notice that there are 8 unattached ends split into to groups of 4. In each group of 4 ends put the two pairs onto the two indicated pegs in the design. Afterwards you will have 4 ends on either peg. Do this for both arms on both sides. After this you will keep looping by digging for the bottom set of bands and hooking it onto the peg above it. Do this until you reach the top of the head.

Step 5: Pull It Off and Finish It Up

After you have finished looping what you will do is fit another and through top loops of his head and secure it so that there are no more loose ends and then pull him off from top to bottom. After this I gave him some detailing including a yellow band to act as his belt and another to act as the yellow of the symbol (I fished that one in and through him). Lastly I finished him of with a piece of red felt cut into the shape of a cape.