I recently made a balloon dog out of sponge for a gag I use in my kids shows. Lots of possibilities, it compresses flat so you can produce it from anywhere. I have had a few inquiries from other magicians so I also added it to my sponge items for sale, if anyone is interested.



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Alexander,

How large is that sponge dog? Where can we buy one?

I love that balloon dog, and can see ideas already!

They definitely have loads of comedy potential! They are just under 30cm (12 inches) long and +- 15cm (6 inches) high.

At the moment the sponge balloon dogs are only available directly from my site - www.alexander-may.com/html/sponge_items.html

Let me know if you need any help.

Alexander, you have some fantastic stuff there. We are spoilt for choice. Great work.

Magic George's Mind Reading Hat is no longer published, unfortunately. It's a great concept and I use it in every show. I've built on it a lot. The gist of it is this: Have the child select a card from a deck of pictures. Create two basic balloon hats -- one for you, one for the child -- to be "mind reading hats," and then read their mind. Once the mind is read, create the balloon they were thinking of. Magic George suggests miscalling the balloon at first... like... if they picked "giraffe," make a standard one balloon wiener dog and call it a dog. When they say no, rotate the the legs and tail to make the giraffe.

Magic George's routine had talked about using a deck he found that rotated through four picture cards... I forget what they were and the deck wasn't available in the US. But it would go one, two, three, four, one, two, three, four, etc. So you could freely show four cards and suggest that the deck was all different. Then by memorizing the order you can always know the card the selected to peeking at the bottom card.

I use cards I made myself and I simply force the card I want them to get because I've built a lot of gags around creating a specific balloon.

At the end of the day it's simply a "pick a card, this is your card" routine, but it's built around balloons to give you an excuse to use all those wonderful bits of business you can get with them.

Gret stuff Alexander.

Thank you! I appreciate all the great comments you guys have left regarding the sponge items. I have some good news for those in the US, Penguin Magic will be stocking some of my items in the very near future, so then it will be easier & quicker to buy through them