Discovering a hobby: Juggling begleri beads

Sooo. You liked the previous article about butterfly knife tricks. You got bit by the tricking bug (and maybe even by the knife itself). You now feel empty when there's nothing in your hands to play with along the day.

Unfortunately, flipping knives around is not really the most socially acceptable activity in most of places. It might not even be legal in many of them.

Worry no more (pun intended). There is a safe, discreet and accessible way to get similar sensations, that you can make right now and carry with you anywhere : Begleri beads.

02/11/2016 Update:
If you're not convinced, watch this cool tricks video on the topic:

Beglewhat?

Begleri beads are a traditional Greek past time, that seems relatively unheard of in the rest of the world.
In its most traditionnal form (called Komboloi, aka. worry beads), the beads are the kind of necklace-y prayer beads or rosaries you might already have seen in various parts of the world.They are used with or without religious connotation to ease one's mind and keep hands busy.

Traditional Komboloi

Begleri, are a more modern variation of those.
Most of times they consist of only two large beads, held together by a relatively short piece of string.

Modern style begleri

They resurfaced recently, especially among EDC enthousiasts, who discovered they were a simple and small toy, you could always carry around. People started sharing a couple basic moves, and a small enthusiasts community seems to have developed around coming up with and more advanced tricks.

They're a favourite past time of mine, and I carry those I made everywhere since I discovered the hobby maybe two years ago.

They are easy to make with whatever materials you have at hand, don't take much space in your pocket or bag (you can even easily use them as a keychain), and provide countless hours of fun.

Begleri beads, stored as a bag charm/keychain for quick access.

They are especially quick to get out and back into your pocket, making them particularly suitable for quick entertainment in everyday boring situations such as traffic jams, waiting for the elevator, waiting in line, killing time during your daily commute, or stimulating your brain when trying to solve a complicated computer or programming problem.

Making yours

The beauty of begleri is that they are a very accessible hobby. You can get them as simple or as fancy as you want, and can most likely throw together your first pair in a couple minutes from stuff you have laying around. Not only can you make your first pair right now and get started, but you can also quickly improvise one to get your friends involved once they try it.

The simplest forms of begleri can be made from some string (paracord works great), and various hardware such as nuts, copper pipe fittings, spare wrench sockets, pierced throwing dice, big craft or wooden beads or by simply making monkey fist knots around marbles.
Basically anything robust and heavy enough will do. Repeatedly hit fingers will quickly teach you what does or not work for you.

If you're the absent minded type, the simplest version consisting of a string and a pair or two of stainless steel nuts held with knots will probably be the cheapest and most expendable version you can afford loosing often.

Various types of improvised begleri beads

You are also pretty free to pick whatever suits you best regarding bead size, weight, and string length.
For your first tries, try to stick to the following guidelines until you develop your own feel for it.
- Try to keep beads relatively small (so you can easily catch and release them from between your fingers
- Use the following pictures as a guideline for  commonly agreed upon starter string lengths.Once you start getting the hang of it, you can start experimenting with shorter or longer strings.Some tricks are easier/only possible with certain string lengths.

Some common ways of determining suitable string lengths

I will show you in an upcoming article how to tie the common monkey fist type begleri using just  paracord and marbles.Those are a very easy and cheap way of getting started if you're already into paracord craft and knotting.Their second main advantage is they are also silent.
Repeatedly dropping metal balls on desks and wood flooring tends to make work colleagues angry somehow. The stress induced jumps this produces seems slightly counter productive given the soothing origin of the hobby ^^.

One of the simplest form of begleri: the paracord monkey fist knot type, is readily accessible to any paracord or knotting enthusiast. At it simplest, it only requires a piece of string, having two marbles to weight them can help though.

Meanwhile, if you enjoy the hobby, or are of the compulsive buyer type, you can also ditch DIY and buy various kinds of begleri beads already made for pretty cheap on ebay or other craft sites.
You can also make your own and get pretty fancy with it. Some advanced begleri are known to be hand machined, glow in the dark, made from titanium or bronze or feature forever-glow-in-the-dark radioactive tritium vials and fancy knots.

The fancy kind of begleri beads

Learning tricks

The begleri community has developed a couple basic tricks, and some more advanced ones.
Most people also quickly come up with their own tricks from doing whatever feels right or recovering from common mistakes.

The following video shows the 3-4 most basic tricks you should probably learn first.
- First just develop the feel for juggling the beads between your thumb and index finger
- Then learn grabbing the free bead between pinky and ring finger as a transition, and swing it around from there
- Lastly, learn to transition back to your original position.You should be now able to make the beads rollover your whole hand by combining those tricks.
- You can then practice doing the rollover in both directions, and with both hands.

When ready, you can then move on to more advanced tricks.

 

More references

Juggling begleri is still a pretty niche hobby, and few resources exist about it.

Here are some of the hot spots
- r/begleri on reddit
- a begleri tutorials playlist on youtube
- The EDC forums thread that started it all
- Various pinterest boards also seem to centralise much resources.


I hope you enjoyed discovering this cool and addictive hobby as much as I did.
Maybe you can now be part of helping it spread around the world to be the next big thing.

Enjoy spinning stuff around until next time!