Jumping Thimble | ★★ | Baffling Boomerangs | ★ |
With the thimble on your right middle finger, extend your left hand palm upwards. Place your right ring finger and middle finger flat onto the palm of the left hand. Now, very quickly raise your right hand and slap your left palm with your right fingers; at the same time, bend your ring finger and extend your middle finger. Do it again, reversing the action of the fingers, and the thimble APPEARS to jump from one finger to another and back again.
Take the card with the two boomerangs on it and cut them out. If you hold them up (as shown in figure 1), the audience will see that they are the same size. Blow on the pieces and then hold them next to each other (as shown in figure 4). This is an optical illusion, because it will seem that one piece is larger than the other.
The Really Jumping Thimble | ★★★ |
Although the previous trick can be very deceptive, you should really use it as an introduction to this effect. You will be able to deceive even those who guess how the previous trick was done. Have the thimble on the middle finger as before, but this time as you raise and lower your right hand grip the sides of the thimble with your third finger and thumb. Now you will be able to remove the thimble from your middle finger and insert it onto your ring finger. Now the thimble is REALLY on another finger. You can make the thimble jump onto all your fingers if you spend some time practicing gripping the thimble in all sorts of different ways. Don’t forget in all this jumping that you can still make the thimble appear to jump onto a different finger using the previous trick. (Note: If even the small thimble is too big for your hand, fill the thimble with clay, putty, or dough for a tighter fit.)
The Houdini Coin | ★ |
Place a penny (or any coin) on one of the plastic windows, surround it with the red plastic square with the hole, put the other plastic window on top and secure your “money sandwich” with the four rubber bands provided. Hold it by two edges between the index finger and thumb of your right hand. Cover your hand and the coin with the handkerchief, squeeze the plastic windows, and the coin will secretly drop into your hand. Remove the handkerchief and the coin is gone.
Which Name Remains? | ★ |
Ask your audience to name twelve famous movie stars and write each one down on a piece of paper. Fold each paper and put them into a hat. Then ask to be blindfolded. Take a piece of paper out of the hat and ask the audience to hide the remaining eleven. You know exactly which name is on the paper. Solution: You write the same name on all the papers, but pretend to write a different name on each paper. All you have to do is to remember the name and as the other papers have been hidden, nobody can find out the secret of the trick. Of course, you have to take care that nobody sees the hidden papers afterward.
10 | 11 |
