 The earliest references to skipping from the 16th century relate to skipping with a hoop rather than a rope. In Britain, the earliest reference to rope skipping is to single skipping in the early 18th century. Skipping ropes have been manufactured for children since the 18th century, though of course improvisation plays its part in this history. Washing lines were often used to make a long rope. The two basic forms of skipping are single skipping with a short rope and group skipping with a long rope, which were observed by Alison Utley, enthusiastic chronicler of Victorian childhood. Clearly, these basic forms are still to be found today. As with clapping games, part of the appeal here is skill, demonstrated both by the complexity and variety of moves mastered, but also by speed. As the opies memorably said, the expert skipper reminds one not of a fluttering butterfly, but a machine gun. In long rope skipping, there are different methods of turning the rope, for example, varying the speed, often regulated by a chant such as salt, mustard, vinegar, pepper, salt being the slowest and pepper the fastest, and in doing the bumps in which the rope is whipped round so fast that it passes under the skipper's feet twice in one jump. So on the letters of Mrs D, Mrs I, Mrs F F I, Mrs C, Mrs U, Mrs L T Y. Another method was to swing the rope from side to side rather than turn the rope, as in the initial part of the rhyme Blue Bell's Cockle Shell's E. V. I. V. Over. The other kind of skipping game to note is elastics, or French skipping, played with a long continuous loop of elastics stretched around the legs of the two enders to form a rectangle. Elastics took root in Britain in the 1960s, brought from the USA and ultimately originating from China or Japan. This seems to come and go in intense crazies. While the opies recorded a wide variety of rhymes accompanying skipping games, the playgrounds researched for this website produced a smaller repertoire. Some were old favourites such as teddy bear, teddy bear turn around, teddy bear, teddy bear touch the ground, still found across Britain, and Cinderella dressed in yellow, which has been in circulation at least since the 1960s. Finally, as with any game involving physical objects, children display considerable inventiveness in using skipping ropes for other purposes, building them into pretend play to serve as snakes, reins for a horse, or other imaginative transformations.