We’re having a long cold winter this year in the UK which means we can’t get out much, so my son and I have decided to take up Poi.

We were introduced to poi last summer at a circus skills workshop. Poi is the art of swinging two balls on string in a controlled manner while doing tricks.

I’ve included a YouTube video of someone doing fire poi (obviously we aren’t using fire poi to learn :-) ) to explain what poi is.

Poi looks easy, but is isn’t and takes a lot of practise and patience. My hubby naively thought poi was easy after watching me and my son and decided to show us how it was done, after smacking himself in the head a few times he decided to leave it to us :-)

While learning poi you do tend to smack yourself in the head and groin if your a boy a lot, so you have to be a calm person whom is patient to learn, but when you do, the rewards speak for themselves you gets lots of exercise and it looks cool :-)

A great website we’ve found called Play Poi has been a god send, it has lots of great introduction videos that teach you the basics.

We have made our own sock poi’s, if you would like to make some of your own instructions for sock poi’s is below.

Sock Poi are great for beginners and are easy on the wallet compared to commercial Poi :-)

If you would like to watch a video on how to make sock poi there’s one on the play poi website or check out YouTube.

How to Make Sock Poi

What you need to make a sock poi.

A pair of stretchy long socks (can be bought for about £2 from a cheap shop)
Two Balloons
Raw rice grain (bought from supermarket)

What To Do.

1. Fill the balloons with dry rice until they’re the size of juggling balls and tie them off.

2. Place the rice filled balloons at the bottom of each sock and place a knot in the sock above where the balloon is.

3. Fold over the top of the sock to form handles and knot them to make them secure, try to make each poi roughly the same length.

Now you have a cheap pair of sock pois.