Cool Magic Tricks - Torn & Restored Straw Paper

Astonishing John: Hi! I'm San Diego professional magician, Astonishing John, how would you like to learn a cool magic trick? I've got one for you right here. This is called the Torn and Restored Straw Paper. All you need is the paper from a straw, like that, don't even need the straw. I'll show you the magic. I'm going to take it, and we're going to rip it in half. Put it together, rip it in half again, put it together one more time and rip it in half again.

And for those of you who think that I may not be ripping it, all these little pieces should convince you that it's actually all torn up. Okay, what I'm going to do is I'm going to gather these pieces up, roll them into a little ball, okay, right here, squeeze it nice and tight until we get this, nice little ball, right here. As I rub it, and pull on it, you see, it's gone back to one piece of paper. Absolutely perfect, absolutely restored.

Now, let me show you how it's done. There's a little secret. Before you start this, you want to take one piece of paper. We'll use this one. Let me get another straw, right over here, straw paper, and one of them you're going to fold up, an Accordion fold. An Accordion fold is like this. You take the straw, and you kind of fold it into itself, into itself, into itself, I hope you can see that. It makes it easy to open the paper later, because if you just bunch it up, you might rip it.

The Accordion fold, like this, just takes a moment to do and you end up with two loose ends. You take the center and you bunch it up into a ball, bring that in a little bit closer. Let me show you where this goes. This goes right between your fingers here, that little ball of paper. You can pretty much hold your hands normally; it stays right there, because it's pinched between the flesh of your hand. But you don't do it so much if you see it from the other side. If you just see it from one side, then you can act normal.

You take the paper off the straw, like this, and then you tear it in half. You tear it in half again. You tear it in half for third time. Now you say, anybody thinks that you're not tearing this paper, you just drop it, and you can see that it is actually being torn into lots of little pieces. You take and gather all these little pieces up, okay, roll them into a ball, like this. Put them into your hand and squeeze it tight, and then, you remove the ball, your hand looks completely empty, because all you've done is taken like this.

This is the piece that you did before the trick; this is the one you just ripped up in little pieces. You catch that in the flesh of your hand, and the other one you just remove. So when you show it, your hand looks pretty empty. You can open it up pretty widely. Then you just find the little ends after you've done your magical pass, and you can show the paper totally restored.

You can drop your hands to your waist now and to the people. You can lose this other piece underneath the table by just letting go or coming to the edge and letting it roll off, just push it off. Your hands are empty, you've got a miracle right there. You've restored that piece of paper. That is the Torn and Restored Straw Paper.

Now, the next thing I want to show you is the Cycle Kinetic Straw.