Tom Stone

8 September 2022

Tom Stone started his lecture with an effect he calls 'Mittens', this was a comedy routine, where 2 spectators choose and sign a playing card, while Tom claims his hands are secret weapons and wants to handicap himself from sleight of hand by wearing a pair of oven gloves, lo and behold both signed cards end up inside the oven gloves.

Tom then explained various ways of working out this effect and an alternative way of finding the chosen cards mate, but his genius idea of simply cutting a hole in the right glove, allowing him to palm the card so both signed cards end up inside, is very sneaky and was also very funny especially his paddle move.

For me this was my favourite effect of the evening and the one | can most likely see myself performing.

Tom then went on to perform an effect using a ring-bound notebook, where the spectators signed card appeared inside the notebook, this involved a switch of the previously placed notebook, on the table through a cut out in the bottom of the box and a cleverly constructed holder to keep the ring binders of the notebook open.

This involved a pre-punched card and a palm to achieve the method all happening inside the box.

The spectator then follows instructions from the notebook revealing the signed card in the back of the book.

Tom calls this effect 'white death'. It uses 10 blank cards with the word 'death' written on the back, which the spectator doesn't see. They are laid out in pairs as the spectator then chooses the card 'ice sheet' they want to step on using a ball or coin to make it to the other side. As they choose one, the other card is eliminated and placed into a (himber) wallet as they make their final decision.

Once the spectator selects the last card, you do a 'Carlyle paddle move' and show both to be blank, revealing that all the cards they chose were the 'Death' cards.

Tom finished off his set with an effect he calls 'Post Nord'. Tom explains it's to do with the mystery of the postal service. He shows 2 boxes and places 1 on each table, he then invites a spectator to choose a postcard and attempts to get the signed postcard to teleport to the other box.

After no luck and receiving junk mail the spectator's signed postcard ends up inside a sealed envelope in a bag.

This also remained a mystery to us all as he ran out of time - Thanks Kevin 'Curry' Peel

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