Thursday, June 2, 2011

You has question

I has answer!

Kepanie of Knitspiring Odyssey asks what do I stuff poi with? And the answer is NOT Chinese zen balls (you know the kind that jingle when you roll them around). The newest addition to our group, V, had made herself a simple set of sock poi by putting these Chinese zen balls in to a pair of old socks and knotted them off. Last night we were celebrating Apollo's birthday at the all night donut place and spinning poi in the parking lot, and I decided to give V's socks a spin. Since I'm still a beginner, I get tangled and whack myself with the poi a lot, but I've also gotten used to ducking. Well, I'm also used to softer poi, so when these socks tangled and the end came swinging at my head, I ducked, but not fast enough. Then next thing everyone heard was CRACKtingtingting, or maybe I'm the only one that heard the zen balls jingle but everyone heard the smack. The first thing Apollo said was "Was that your HEAD that I heard???" It still kind of smarts.

To seriously answer the question, Apollo and I use balloons filled with rice measured out to weigh so many grams (aprox 75 grams for the ones I'm making). The process of filling a balloon with rice is a tedious one. You need to put a funnel in the balloon neck and then you fill up the body of the balloon, and then carefully fill the neck. Then you have to blow air into the balloon to expand it to fit all the rice. Then you put more rice in the neck, and blow air into it again, and more rice, and more air. It takes at least 6 or 7 rounds of this, but then you knot the end of the balloon and you have a nice little rice filled rubber ball.

Initially before we figured out the rice balloons, Apollo's socks were weighted with rubber duckies. He had a small collection of them, so he just picked two of the heaviest and put them down the socks. The ducks were actually replacements for golf balls, but those had to go after a couple of head incidents like my zen ball incident. Apollo also has a pair of practice poi that is literally two tennis balls on strings, but poi can essentially be anything that you can successfully spin around you in interesting patterns. Apollo's probably going to be learning to spin fire over the summer too. I probably won't even attempt that for a good while yet, I'd like to be able to spin socks without killing myself first.

2 comments:

  1. Ouch! I hope your head is O.K. Sounds like fun, though.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Mahalo for the backlink. When I read Chinese Zen balls, I was like uh oh...that can't be good.
    Glad your head's okay. What a process to fill up the balloon w/rice and air!

    ReplyDelete