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SLEIGHT
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The Ball and Vase

A small ball in a turned wooden or brass vase vanishes, returns, and changes place — the prop that has been in beginners' boxed sets for over a century.

Difficulty
Beginner
Performs
Close-Up, Parlor, Walk-Around
Type
Vanish

What they see

The effect from the front

A small vase with a lid is opened and a ball tipped out. The ball goes back in, the lid goes on, and the vase is handed to a spectator to hold.

It is opened. Empty. The ball is in a pocket, or under a hat, or has become a different colour.

The better handlings make the spectator wrong rather than the performer clever: they are invited to say where the ball is, they say the vase, and the vase is empty every time until the one time they say it is not.

Provenance

Where it comes from

One of the oldest commercially manufactured magic props still sold. Turned-wood versions appear in nineteenth-century dealer catalogues and the design has barely changed since; brass and plastic followed.

It has been in beginners' boxed sets for so long that generations of magicians own one without remembering buying it, which is both why it is dismissed and why it still works on people who have never seen one.

Learning it

What it takes

The most forgiving prop in this catalogue and a reasonable first trick for a child.

There is effectively no sleight of hand. The whole effect is in the handling of the vase and the patter around it, which makes it an unusually good exercise in presentation: with nothing to hide, the only thing you can get better at is the performance.

Its limitation is the angle and the distance. This is a trick for a table or a small group, and it does not survive being passed round a room.

What you need

Props for the The Ball and Vase

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