Hello, welcome. My name is Lynden Blades and today what we are going to do is I want to show something really, really fantastic. I want to talk about the different types of juggling balls and how to make your own juggling balls out of household items. They are pretty much as good as the best juggling balls that you can get. But first of all I want to talk about what the differences are in juggling balls and juggling equipment. And the first thing is that people always say to me, “oh well, just let us jug, we have got tennis balls have you?” And the thing is with tennis balls they are probably the worst thing that you could possibly use for juggling and the reason is that when you are juggling anything that has got a hard surface, is really, really unforgiving. It bounces off the hard pads of your hand, if the balls collide in the end and they bounce away from each other and worst of all is when you drop the ball and it lands on the floor, it stops to roll away and you end up running allover your garden or allover the road running after your juggling balls. You spent a lot of time running in on the face of it retrieving and it is just a nightmare. So use proper juggling balls.

Now, first of all, there are a few different juggling balls in the market and these set of juggling balls that I have got here, you can get it from eBay or you buy for with or with no case, for a couple of English pounds, 2 or 3 pounds and the thing with this is that they look, on the face of it, they do not look too bad. The first thing that I notice about them is that they are really quite small which actually if you are a small person you got really small hands that maybe an advantage but a bigger ball is easier to catch. So they are a little bit on the small side but by far the worst thing about them is that they are not very squishy. These balls are quite hard. The surface of them, you cannot really pinch it or manipulate it very much and so what that means is that they got more chances of bouncing of the hard pads of your hand that when you try to catch it and it bounces out of your hand much easier. Also if you have a mid-air juggling ball collision which does happen quite a lot. Because they are hard, they tend to bounce away from you and they go for some odd trajectory is what really makes it hard to catch and predict where they are going to go. Also there are a lot better than tennis balls but they are still, if I do the drop test, well they are not to bad at this but they are a little bit lively, I mean if they got a little bit spin on them, they really will run so that when you are practicing outside, you are going to spend quite a bit of time chasing a after this. They are much better than tennis balls but they are not really that great. On the outside they are very cheap. So you know if you are planning outside with them and they got lost to, you know, if they wear out, then that is not too bad because they are not very expensive. So that is the cheapest versions. So the ones that I prefer to use are these, they are quite a little bit more expensive that these are probably about 10 to 12 to 15 English pounds with a set of three. But they are much bigger they are quite a bit heavier and the thing that you really notice about them is that they are really squishy. Can you see how squishy they are? And that means that I can pinch them. They do not bounce off my hand; they got to stick to your hand when they land on your hand. They are absolutely fantastic. And they are really tactile. They feel really nice to the touch. They are nice to play about with and you can mold them into shapes. Now the advantage is, I have actually been in a routine in front of quite a lot of people. Well I have ended up catching a ball like this, between my little finger and the bottom of my hand just the very—so they do not hang a little to motivate it. I will never be able to do that with one of these days because it is just does not give. So these balls are really forgiving. If you are not, you know tremendously accurate, you have a much easier time with the sets of these balls. So where do you buy a sets of balls like this? If you live in the big city like London, or New York, or Tokyo then there is going to be you know a lot of big cities actually have got juggling suppliers. These days if you go to websites like eBay or on the internet and do research for juggling balls, you get quite a few people who is selling them on websites. These are called spotlights or thuds that is what they are called. And the reason that they are called thuds is that when they are dropped, they just get a thud and they stopped then. So that spend anytime running around even if I get this bit of spin it just does not go anywhere. If I do the same thing with one of these, it rolls over the table. So you can imagine if you drop this from your right tight and that is magnified. So you go to cheap juggling balls, you got a nice expensive squishy professional juggling ball and these do last for a long time.

How about making a set of juggling balls out of things in your own home? There are many as good as these and much better than these. Well that is the gift that I would like to give you now and share with you the technique. So what do you need? You need some rice, you need a measuring cup, and you need a sock. Now I assure you that this sock is a clean sock and that is going to help. And the thing about the sock to choose is a sock that has got some elastic properties about it. They are not like cottons, you know a cotton sock—a nice elastic sock is going to work best. What you need to do is measure out rice that is about the same amount with what you are going to put inside the juggling ball and I happened to know that about this little measuring cup about one and a bit of these is about enough. The reason that we measure it out is that you want to end up with three balls of the same size rather than having one big bowl and one small bowls, that adds so much time with juggling. So measure the rice out into your measuring cup like this, so that is about one full cup. The way you can do is tight the neck of the sock and hold it over the top of the cup and this minimizes mess and turn it upside down. We should have an empty cup here and just do a little bit more. So I will go back one at a time. And like I said, it does not really matter as long as there will be same sides. So I will put the top of the sock over the cup again into the bottom of the sock. It should be about enough. Now tell me if you can see that very well but I have got the rice, it is now stocked in the bottom of the sock and what I am doing is that I am isolating the rice in the bottom and then twisting it over like this, so I am twisting the sock, so I have got a twist. Now what I am going to do is I am going to turn this sock inside out around that twist. So I got good twist in that and then I will turn the sock inside out around itself like this and then shake it down to the bottom and then I have got the same situation again. So I will go over right that, twist it around, and then turn the remainder of the sock inside out around it and then if there is any spare material on the side, I can just fold it back and what I have here is a near perfection quality juggling ball and thus you can say, it is a little bit bigger so I could take some rice out just if I want to make it perfect. But it is absolutely fine like that. So can you see, it is really squishy. That means it is going to be easy to catch and it is not going to bounce out of my hand. If I drop it, it just lies on the table and even if I give it a bit of spin, it just does not go anywhere at all compared to this. So I need three of this and I can use this just perfectly well as a juggling ball and not with the absolutely perfect. What we can do is that you can really create it by buying really fiber-made colored to the socks. And just to make sure that the structure—you have anything that you need to do.

So the only thing with any kind of juggling ball is if you are doing some juggling outside then do not try getting this wet because I have got rice inside them and then made of cloth if you get this wet then the rice is going to expand and it will end up with a big mess. The nice thing about this is that they are plastic coated. So that they actually repel water to their extent but still they do not do very well if you get them really, really wet. So that is how to make really good quality performance quality juggling balls as of items in your own home. I hope that has been really useful to you. Please go to visit my archive on freejugglinglessons.com and help me teach as many people in the world as I can completely free of charge how to juggle and spread some happiness around.

In the meantime, my name is Lynden Blades, it has been a pleasure to talk to you today and I will see you soon. Take care. Bye.