The House of Skills Toy Collection

by Crazy Ivan

Last night I decided to catalogue all the skill toys at the House of Skills and I figured I would share the exercise in pictures.  Now, I should warn you ahead of time, you're in for a lot of pictures.  The skill toy collection we've got is the combination of 5 collections, any of which might be impressive on its own.

That being said, the bulk of what you're going to see is mine.  I've been an avid skill toy aficionado for over 20 years now and in that time, things start to pile up.

The obvious place to begin is with juggling balls.  It's the first skill toy I ever fell in love with so it's the first one I put on the table last night.  Again, we've been collecting these things for a while, so they add up:

(sorry, Blogspot's servers are screwy today so I have no control over photo size!)



And once you learn to use those, it's only a matter of time before you add the rings:



And after you learn to use them, you're ready for the challenge of the clubs (sorry about the blur):



But those are just your basic juggling props. Skill toys come from all over the world so we have to add our Asian skill toys to the mix. Here are a few diabolos:



And a couple of sets of Devil Sticks:



Of course, Monk lives here too. He's got a stash of "Flair Bottles" and shakers to add to the mix:



Not sure if you'd notice, but I added a few yo-yos and astrojax to the table on this one:



Again, not sure if you'd notice because it's so subtle, but I added a unicycle in this next picture:



And these weird looking suckers here are "kangaroo stilts":



Now, technically nunchukas and a bo-staff would be considered weapons (they are certainly not toys), but since we only use them for skills and never for defending ourselves against ninjas, I thought I'd add them as well.



And a hat isn't strictly speaking a skill toy either. This one, however, was purchased in a juggling store and is specially designed for manipulation so I'd be slacking if I didn't add it.



Here we have a set of glow-poi and a meteor. If you've never seen them in action, a quick You-Tube search is in order (but for the meteor make sure you search "meteor juggling" or you'll just get video of meteors):



And when you do skill toys long enough you eventually end up setting some of them on fire. Here you'll see I've added a set of juggling torches, fire devil sticks and a set of fire poi:



These are my Cigar Boxes and no, they don't have cigars in them. They're juggling props and have nothing to do with cigars except for the name:



This crazy looking sucker is a balance board:



And this is the most recent addition to the collection, the slack line:



I'm sure that by now you've noticed that one skill toy is suspiciously absent in this collection but I wanted to wait until the end to add the Myachis:



So when you put it all together and then stack a chair on a cabinet so you can get high enough up to get a solid picture of it, all the toys look something like this:



And yes, I did this all for you. It took about forty minutes to set everything up and get all the pictures, but the clean up time was surprisingly fast: