Colm Fitzpatrick
Children’s Corner
By now the Christmas Day festivities of exchanging presents, singing hymns and gorging on mince pies will be over, and family and visiting friends will be enjoying relaxing and being entertained, especially if children are the ones performing. From dancing and singing to acting and playing an instrument, parents, aunties and uncles often appreciate the quirkiness and novelty of this kind of entertainment.
One fast way you can amuse and baffle everyone this Christmas is by performing a magic trick, and if ambitious, a magic show. Here is one fun trick that anyone can learn, which has a simple method but still a fooling effect.
In this trick, you will pour water into a cup and with a magical gesture, (and a secret method), you will turn the cup over and some ice will fall out. You have managed to freeze the water into ice-cubes!
This magic trick is particularly easy to perform and requires no sleight-of-hand. All you need is an opaque cup or mug, a sponge, some ice-cubes and water.
Firstly, you take the sponge and stuff it down into the bottom of the cup so that when turned over it can’t fall out. Next you take the ice cubes and put them on top of the sponge. Then you are ready to go.
You tell your audience that you will attempt to freeze water with your magical powers. You pick up the cup which has the sponge in it, and then pour in a small amount of water from a different cup. What the audience doesn’t know is that the hidden sponge will soak up all of the water leaving just the ice-cubes behind. After saying some magical words, you turn the cup over and only the ice will fall out.
Your audience will be confused as to how you completed such a feat. If you are feeling ambitious, once the ice has been poured out, you could swap the sponged cup for an identical one without the sponge under the table. This means that the cup will be fully examinable so when your audience inspect it, there will be nothing to find.
You are not restricted to just water and ice either. You could place a small orange inside the sponged cup and pour in some orange juice, and then reveal that you transformed juice into an orange, or you could even change lemonade into a lemon. The possibilities are endless.
With this first magic trick under your belt, you can entertain all of your guests, and will also be one step closer to becoming a master magician.