Everything I know about making hoops

Hoop material

Hoop tubing can be purchased at Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse.It’s in the back of the plumbing section, and if can’t find it, ask for irrigation tubing. Most people will buy 100’ rolls, but if you really get into it, most sizes also come in 400’ rolls. You will need connectors of the right size diameter for your hooping, approximately 10-12 for each 100’ of hoop. It doesn’t hurt to look at the connectors individually because it’s not uncommon for them to get mixed up in the boxes.

“Fast” hoopers prefer ¾” 160# tubing. This is a bit harder on your hands, but good for twins.
“Slower” hoopers might prefer 1” 100# tubing. It’s fairly soft, but hard to manage when you’re hooping twins.
Children’s hoops and juggler hoops can be made of ¾” 100# hooping, but that weight is not for adult-sized hoops. It deforms badly at speed when made larger than 30”.
"Large" hoops can be made of 1" 160# tubing, which is expensive, but lets me build a heavier hoop, which is good for beginners, without it being too big to fit in the truck.

The parts numbers for the tubing at Lowe’s Home Improvement Warehouse are:

1 inch 100 PSI : #24169
3/4 inch 160 PSI : #24195
3/4 inch 100 PSI: # 24166

If you’re going to make a few hoops, go ahead and buy the $10-13 tubing cutters. They look like strange scissors. They leave a cleaner cut than a saw and are a bit easier to use. (You don’t need the $25 pair.)

It’s OK to cut one hoop’s worth of tubing off the roll, but tape up the remaining end so that it’s curved with the rest of the roll. You may need extra tape to do this. If you leave the end straight, it will be hard to curve into hoop shape on your next hoop, and you may lose a foot or two of material. This won’t matter much, and per-foot, it’s pretty cheap. You can also cut all the hooping at the same time and make 10 or more hoops in a day or two.

Hoop size

Circumference = 2 * pi * r, where r = radius. 2r = diameter. Therefore, the length of tubing you need to cut is pi * height.

Beginner hoops: shoulder-to-sternum height.
Intermediate hoops: waist height.
Serious dance hoops: hip height.
Very fast hoops: inseam height.

In other words, if you’re making hoops for a crowd, you’ll want a range with at least one at 60”, several at 46-48”, and then the rest as needed. Some events have many more small children than others.

I don’t measure length any more; I simply curl the tubing against an existing hoop and cut it to match, or not, as needed.

I have a 6’ diameter hoop made of 2” tubing. Many men are comfortable hooping in that hoop where they won’t try a smaller or fancier one. I put a run of gaffer tape around the inside of the hoop to give it grip for shoulder hooping, and it’s wiffled (has holes drilled into it) and sings at different pitches depending on its speed.

Joining the ends

I used to use a gas stove to heat the ends of the tubing enough that they will slip over the connector. Be careful, obviously. Too much heat and the tubing will deform; not enough and you’ll battle to get the hoop closed all the way. Now I use boiling water. Some patient people heat the ends with a hair dryer.

For smaller hoops (24-30”), shorten the connector a bit so the hoop is more easily round. Otherwise, the hoop will have a straight place on both sides of the connector. You can use tubing cutters to shorten the connector.

If I’m doing more than one hoop, I’ll get one end of a connector in each piece of tubing before connecting the other end. Usually, the first end has cooled by the time I’m ready to do the second end, but if it hasn’t, quench the heat with cold water. If you can’t get the end to the sink, a wet dish cloth will do the trick.

If you’re making a cloth-covered hoop, put the cloth sleeve over the hoop before joining the second end.

If you’re making a water hoop, pour one cup of water into the hoop before sealing. Water in the hoop makes heating the second end a bit trickier.

It’s easy to kink the hoop when connecting the second end. Keep the hoop round while the tubing cools and have a wet dish cloth handy to quench the heat.

Decorating hoops

Some people can dance with untaped hoops, perhaps sanded for a bit more grip.
Spray paint tends to come off on whatever the hoop hits.
Duct tape oozes nastily when it gets warm and fails completely in high heat, as might be found in the trunk of a car.
Gaffer tape, decorative metallic tape (“sparkly”), and electrician’s tape are, to date, the best to use for decorating hoops.
Gaffer tape, available on the web (not locally in Raleigh), is cloth tape with a non-residue, non-oozing glue. It comes in lots of colors, some of which are ugly. It comes in 2”, 1”, and ½” rolls. Although the 2” rolls can be torn lengthwise if needed, I’ve taken to using 1” as my widest tape because it handles easily. It’s a good width to start with. ½” tape is pretty for accent colors.

I like the fluorescent colors of gaffer tape—yellow, orange, green, and pink—much more in real hoops than I expected and will buy large rolls on my next order. Kodak yellow is another good hoop color, as is red, Pro-Gaff’s blue, and burgundy. Purple is more “lilac,” in my mind. Teal is useful. Black is handy if you want to add grip to a dark hoop.

I will not be buying more electrician’s tape unless I need black or white; the colors vary among brands and are never as pretty as the good gaffer tape colors. It is cheap, though. Lowe’s has electrician’s tape in colors, and many of the on-line tape suppliers offer it much cheaper, although the colors found on-line have not been as bright as the tape I bought in a store (which still isn’t as pretty as gaffer tape).

An average hoop consumes about 25’ of tape per color. Sparkle tape is sold in rolls of 25’; allow one roll per hoop. You may have some leftover. You can cut 1” tapes in half lengthwise and get more mileage out of them.

The silver holographic tapes are pretty in the sun; most of the colored holographic tapes are much prettier to look at when they are still than they are when the hoop is moving.
Glitter tape is a bear to tape with—it tends to wander and it does not “untape” to correct a mistake.
Although the tape itself isn’t much to look at, some of the best hoops are made with the plain mirror tape. (BTW, “brass” = very yellow, compared to a more sedate “gold.”)
Glow-in-the-dark tape is fun. It is also very slick.
Highway reflector tape looks better when the hoop’s not moving than it does in motion, and it’s hard to get on the hoop straight.
Aluminum tape for ductwork makes a very “high tech”-looking hoop, but it needs additional gaffer tape for grip.

hooping at the Pittsboro Circle Taping patterns vary. If I’m making a sparkle hoop, I put the metallic tape down first. It sticks better to the hoop material than it does to gaffer tape. Then I’ll add a gaffer tape, and perhaps another accent color, or not. It can be fun to wrap backwards, spiraling the opposite direction, and to weave two different colors of tape over each other. Do not try this on your first hoop. I also like “quartering” a hoop with different patterns or colors on each section.

Sources for hoop tape

I currently buy gaffer tape from www.identi-tape.com, a supplier to tape users in many fields, and sparkle tape from www.mccormicksnet.com, a supplier to the marching band and drill team community. Within McCormick's site, select Guard, then Equipment and Supplies, to get to the tape pages. Both gaffer and sparkle tapes can be ordered from www.identi-tape.com, which also has the DOT and glow-in-the-dark tapes. Identitape sometimes offers 15% off for hoopers (use "hula hula" in the discount field) but has a $100 minimum order which is often more tape than I need. (They have an additional charge for orders less than $100 which can be as much as the price of a roll of tape.) Their holographic tapes may well be the brightest available.

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