Monthly Archives: December 2010
The Gift of Hoop Giving
Merry (day after) Christmas! I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday, I sure did! Santa was veryyy good to me this year! Anyway, I wanted to share a couple of hoops I gave as gifts this year. They were my first attempts at making collapsible hoops and they came out pretty good, if I do say so myself!
This hoop is 3/4 in. 100 PSI with purple duct tape, teal duct tape, zebra print duct tape, and black electric tape. Usually I don’t like to use so much duct tape on one hoop because the ends tend to get stringy or show the white from underneath when I cut it in half. But, since the zebra print tape is already white it helped to cover that up and the black vinyl tape covered the rest of the ugly ends. The only thing I don’t like about collapsible hoops is that you can’t cover the ends of the tubing and connectors with tape because the tubing has to be able to twist around the connector in order for it to collapse, leaving the grey connector exposed a bit.
This hoop is also 3/4 in. 100 PSI. It is made with red vinyl tape, black vinyl tape, and card suit decorative tape. I was going to provide a link to this decorative tape, but I just found out they don’t sell it anymore! I guess I can only make 1 or 2 more with this tape so if you want it let me know!
It is so much fun to give hoops as gifts, always lots of smiles and giggles 🙂 I will be making lots more of these collapsible hoops in the near future for my soon-to-be Etsy shop. I will hopefully be working on that this coming week now that the holiday is over and I have a break from both yoga and HulaFit. This little break will also give me a chance to organize the upcoming hoop gathering that will be happening at Maximum Fitness soon (yay!). Happy holiday hooping!
xx
2 New Hoops!
I have been making lots of new hoops lately in preparation for the holidays. Some I will be using for gifts and some I won’t. These are the first two in my recent batch, I’m not sure if they will be gifts or not yet, but here they are:
This one is made with blue vinyl tape and neon green 1 in. gaffer tape. Both this hoop and the purple/white one are made with 3/4 inch. 100 PSI tubing.
This one is made with purple duct tape, purple vinyl tape (the lighter/pinkish purple), and white vinyl tape. I made sure to put the duct tape on first because the sides tend to get stringy and aren’t very smooth so I wanted to cover that up with the other tapes. I like this one the best out of the two. I like to call it my Very Berry hoop 🙂
xx
Easy(ish) Mapley Treats!
Oops! I thought I had posted this weeks ago, but just found it in my drafts. This year was my fist Thanksgiving away from my family. I spent the holiday with Mark’s family down in Chemung, NY. Before we left I made some maple candy to bring to his dad. The recipe calls for pure maple sugar and his dad harvests his own maple syrup so I wanted to use his to make some mapley treats.
The recipe I used looked pretty easy, but it was my first time really using a candy thermometer and even though I paid close attention to the temperature it still didn’t turn out so easy. Sugar is tricky! They tasted good, but the candy started hardening up too fast and only got about 5 of the molds filled before it was too thick to spoon out. I heated it back up, but they came out looking a little frosty. Oh well, I still thought they tasted great! VERY sugary. It is pretty much like eating maple flavored sugar so it doesn’t take much to satisfy that sweet tooth. I didn’t get a chance to take a picture of them before they were all eaten up…I guess that is a good sign!
xx
I found a picture of my first attempt at making maple candy. The thermometer broke and glass got into the candy so it wasn’t edible, but I got a picture of it cooling off in the molds. Too bad they had to go right in the trash. 😦
HoopBunny 