Hooray for heat-stretching!

Edit: Since I've received so many questions about how I did this, I'm happy to share my knowledge. This is my first heat-stretch project, BTW.

In the basement there is a large woodstove that I use to keep the house warm. I got that up to temperature first. When that gets going, it throws an incredible amount of radiant heat which is well absorbed by black vinyl. The room is also warmed up to 90+ degrees due to convection, so the room is already hot.

This was done in a series of stages. Basically, I tried to evenly warm the vinyl all the way around by passing both sides of the toy towards the radiant side of the stove, feeling the vinyl with my hands to make sure it didn't get too hot. When I was satisfied that the vinyl was at the right temp, I carefully overinflated it by mouth. It was easy to feel it stretch. I tried not to go too far at one time, capping off the toy and letting it sit in the hot room for 20 minutes or a half hour before repeating the same thing.

I think the secret to success is keeping the heat even and not trying to push too much at once. I may have also just gotten lucky ;) Going to try this with a big clear ball next. Obviously, I wouldn't do this to any of my rare toys, but Intex toys are common enough and now especially where they've totally ruined their toys with warning labels, I don't really feel bad doing this.

Plus, holy crap, is that penguin adorable with that big round belly! Otherwise, it's a cute toy, but quite small and not terribly interesting or rideable (although admittedly, I manged to ride him in the pool in Florida...not a very stable toy...although I'm pretty sure I'm a lot older and heavier than the target audience.....ROTFL