Jasele Oita's Blog A weblog about everything

Beauty is held in the eye of the beholder, one of the biggest reasons the world is full of so many types of art and creativity. No matter what somebody creates, somebody somewhere will appreciate its beauty, even if that single person is the one who made it. There are no restrictions on creativity, whether it’s a traditional painting, crafts with the family, or interior design in the home. One product that helps us express our creativity in these ways and many more is foam.

Foam shapes can be used in painting in innumerable ways, with the range of textures the material entails. One of the most basic ways to foam paint is through stamping. Pre-cut foam shapes such as stars or animals can be dipped in paint or ink and used in a fun arts and crafts project with the kids, or can help accent a room instead of going with a wallpaper border. Open-cell materials are absorbent, allowing them to hold paint, which helps you dictate how light or dark each stamping appears. When torn into small pieces, foam offers more utilitarian assistance when painting, squeezing into tight door jambs and corners. Foam-tipped brushes are sold in craft and hardware stores for various purposes, attesting to the versatility foam offers when painting.

Closed-cell foam, meanwhile, can be used when painting to create much more consistent patterns, being much more solid than open-cell foam. These are great for creating your own custom stamps, as their consistency makes them excellent for detailed work when cutting and carving your shapes. Foam cylinders meanwhile, can work much like paint rollers, and depending on the smoothness and surface of the foam used, you can get unique patterns from these as well.

Perhaps Goldilocks echoed what most furniture shoppers are looking for when she said that baby bear’s bed was ‘not too hard, not too soft, just right!’. That is why most of the top mattress and pillow manufacturers spend thousands, if not millions of dollars looking for the perfect foam manufacturers. In the battle for comfort supremacy, market players are looking for the right firm that can provide them materials that fit the ‘Goldilocks standard’.

In modern times, we have moved from using lumpy and uncomfortable feather filled mattresses and pillows to more cost effective and technologically superior polyurethane foam sheets. This type of cushion is not only more sustainable but it is also more flexible in adapting to various needs and applications. For example, there are six different foam compositions for varying applications. Thefurniture foam includes the super soft line which is used in providing additional comfort and support such as in mattress toppers or additional seat padding, the HD36 line which is high density foam that is used for various applications that need firmness for more vigorously used furniture such as couches, benches and seats, and the Lux line for foam applications that require extra support while remaining sufficiently firm that are used moderately such as sleeping mattresses, recliners and recreational products like camping pads.

Article submitted by Foam Distributing. Foam Distributing is a leading provider of top notch furniture foam.

For start-up companies or businesses running on razor-thin budgets in today’s economy, innovation and new products can provide a huge income boost or streamline a costly process, but often carry a degree of risk that can be too much for a company to wager. In the instance of physical products, this is often due to the cost of creating a prototype, whether it’s the most basic variety to analyze physical possibilities, or an advanced creation for pitches to investors. Ideally, prototypes are one of the initial steps that help companies assess practicality and solidify ideas, but depending on the company and its financial situation, prototyping can be costly and hurt sustainability if it doesn’t come through the way it was planned.

Fortunately, there are choices in prototyping that don’t have to break the bank, particularly in the early stages of product development. For simulating the size or scale of a product or market potential, profile cut foam materials are excellent prototyping mediums because they can minimize development costs while maximizing potential.

Imagine you’re about to present your conceptual idea to an investor or project supervisor. If all you really need to do is convey a visual understanding of physical size and scope and not specific details, using foam materials or foam rubber blocks that have been cut to size can be much more affordable than investing in more expensive materials requiring unnecessary overhead. This is particularly important in early stages of development when a product concept is all that needs to be approved, and details can be added later in the process.

Even if your company is already one that specializes in foam manufacturing, foam prototyping can still generate savings if the right materials are used. A design for a new pillow or comfort cushion can ultimately be intended to be a memory foam product, but if you’re only assessing how an idea on paper translates to the foam medium, more affordable substitutes can be used to make early mock-ups without wasting more expensive materials. A cheaper foam can be used to make the form and test machining capabilities, and only after has it met your satisfaction, do you need to begin recreating the product with memory foam. To get even the smartest ideas off the ground, creativity and planning is required, and using foam prototyping is one way to get to where you need to go.