There is a whole community of hoopers out there who want to share their stories, hoops, and moves.  I decided I wanted to make my own hoops so off-I-went-a-emailing various plumbing suppliers around town because the main, but also most elusive, piece of the hoop making process is 3/4″, 180 psi, polyethylene irrigation tubing. You can use other tubing but if you don’t want to add weight, ie; water or sand, to your hoop, this psi of tubing makes the hoops about 1-2 lbs. Anyways,  I found this tubing at the plumbing wholesaler in town Andrew Sheret. After being looked at with quizzical eyes, the nice men sold it to me, I guess there was someone in a few weeks for for me doing the same thing so they paved the way.

Samantha Cunningham-Waldo and Christa Manus groove out on World Hoop Day in Louisville, Kentucky.

World famous busker Emery Carl balancing a guitar & hula hoop at the Pike Place market in Seattle

Unfortunately they only sell it in 100′ coils for about 40 bucks. The rule of hoop making thumb is you want the radius (math term ahhh!) of the hoop to be a few inches above your belly button.  For an average woman, 5’4″ to 5″6, the diameter (the length of tubing you cut) of the hoop should be about 10 feet.  I made 9 good sized hoops from 100′ of tubing.

This was the troublesome part, the 180 psi tubing is so ridgid that the coupling that’s supposed to hold the end together wouldn’t fit in. I even went and got a construction grade heat gun and all that did was make a melty mess. So what I ended up doing was getting short pieces of 1/2″ 180 psi tubing (I actually think it was a high psi than that, I’ll have to double check, it was white on the outside…) and my hot glue gun. Squirt a little hot glue in the hoop, shove the 1/2″ pieces inside and presto-bang-o! you’ve got yourself a hoop.

Now to decorate. The first 2 hoops I made I decorated with electrical tape, by far the easiest, come in lots of colors and CHEAP!  But if you want something flashy you’ve got to look further than the hardware store. I used ducting tape, like the sticky aluminum foil kind, and it made a nice heavy hoop but it was not smooth and pretty. To find the nice sparkly tape I ventured into the land of ebay, there I found Paper Street Plastics with all my taping needs.

There’s some nice tutorials on how to tape hoops on youtube. This one I found very good.

Here are my creations!