Another day and I'm not packing. I spent all of this weekend at Lafayette's Festival International de Louisiane (and not packing). While I was hanging out downtown enjoying wonderful live music from all over the francophone world, I spent a lot of time with a friend Beka, who has recently gotten very interested in hula hooping. She brought a bunch of hula hoops that she had made to the festival, and we were hula-ing up a storm during a lot of the performances.
Beka offered to make me a hula hoop of my own to take back up north, and so today we decided to throw ourselves a hula hoop making party! She came over with all the ingredients:
First of all the tubing: generic 3/4" polyethylene sprinkler tubing from Home Depot.
Next: couplings and electrical tape to secure the ends of the cut tubing.
And finally the decorative tape for the finishing touches.
First Beka cut the tubing to be the proper length. My utility knife was sad and dull, so we just grabbed an extra steak knife from the kitchen and used some sawing action and good old fashioned elbow grease. Since we're coating the tubing in tape there's no need to make the cut particularly neat.
Next is to connect the two raw ends of the tubing together. Beka had found a nifty trick to get the tubing to slide on to the couplings easier, which was to boil some water and dip the ends of the tubing into the water for a few seconds.
And Voila!
We have hula hoops!
But they're not finished yet. Now it's time to make them pretty. So we start with the first round of tape.
Beka brought glitter and hologram tape in addition to colored gaffer's tape. The sparkly tape is a lot more high-maintenance than the gaff tape, which is much more forgiving when wrapping around a hoop. The glitter tape bunches at the edge, and apparently can come unstuck at the edges when worn down by extensive use. Other people recommend using the gaff tape to cover the edges of the glitter tape so as to hold it down and prevent such problems. Beka has used that technique on all of her hoops, and none of her hoops had glitter tape coming off during the hours and hours of use they got at the international festival this weekend, so I can attest to the fact that it works! Here she is wrapping red gaffer's tape around the blue glitter tape already applied to her hoop.
We kept at it for hours. We made 9 hoops in total: 5 full sized and 4 small hoops which Beka wants to practice juggling with.
Almost done!
And here are the results. How beautiful!
And of course now we get to play with them!
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