Woven Fire Hose Strip Ball

If you grew up around palm trees maybe you spent some time making and playing with little balls woven from their leaves. They're fun little trinkets for the beach and now also a popular paper craft, but we've got a job to do and animals depending on us to stave off boredom. We can't work with that Pinteresty garbage, we need to work with zoo-tough materials. Thank god we have fire hose.

Ugly Fire Hose Ball

Here's my first attempt at a fire hose ball using the tab and slot technique to join the pieces. It's pretty wonky looking but there's some good bones in there. Think of the construction as two "U's" joined by tabs. Normally a pill-shaped fire hose ball like this would be made of six pieces of hose with nuts and bolts to hold it all together. Again that's more weight and cost with the additional problem of trying to hide those metal bits behind layers of hose so your animals aren't hurting themselves on the hardware.