Hoopla

Every year I work with City Arts Nottingham on their Hoopla project, a free festival for 0-4 around Nottingham parks. In our previous years I always lemented over the fact we had 1 hoopla set and it was not very hardy plastic. I think there is a real benefit to children playing with wooden toys over plastics, they’re a lot more robust and I feel like they’re very grounding. Our connection with nature and natural materials is really important to me. Because of this I promised Alison (the organiser of this event) that I’d make a wooden hoopla set!

I bought some white oak planks, and found some sapele in a nearby skip and from there started the project. I cut half lap joints into the oak planks to create a cross. These planks weren’t very square and I wanted to keep it that way, liking the idea of a rustic non-perfect item.

Next came turning the pegs on the lathe. The second that I turned my lathe on and the wood started to spin, the cheap lathe I’d bought over a year before conked out. This lead to be purchasing a much higher quality lathe that I still had to repair myself (thank you clumsy delivery drivers). With the new lathe now frankensteined together I could get back to turning the pegs. I cut in grooves on the pegs that I could add paint to.

I added 5 colours of paint, 1 colour for each peg. And then used a pyrography pen to burn in numbers on the oak next to each peg. This being for 0-4 children I thought I’d keep it simple and instead number them 1-5 as opposed to the traditional 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25. (It was also much more simple for me to write!)

Finally I made the quoits. I used rope that Alison had given me, rope that she’d had since her university days (and nearly the same age as me!) I wove this rope into quoits and used embroidery thread to finish off the join.