Here's a popular viewer request: the 3D flowers that Mel was doing at the end of his "Red Pants" video. These flowers are based in the idea of having the poi spinning in a different plane than the hand and therefore creating a spiral or worm-shaped profile for the viewer. Tank and I played with a similar concept two years ago at Firedrums, but placed the poi plane in wall rather than horizontal plane.

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Beginning the process of downloading all the tech from the past three weeks. This is a trick that Asaf (Poiboi) came up with that we used for a lot of our tunneling both at Kinetic and at Firedrums. The idea is to take horizontal cateye vs isolation and utilize some horizontal stacking to switch to the same move on the other side of the body. The spacing works due to that quirk of antispin flowers wherein they put the poi a unit circle distance apart 1/6th of the way around the handpath.

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This is an expansion of an idea from a previous video: when you take 3 downbeat flowers and perform them at a 2-poi length handpath, 1/6 of the way around the handpath there is a point where the distance between the intercept for the hand and its reflection across the horizontal axis of the pattern is one poi length. If we vary the combinations and phasing of 3 downbeat patterns, we wind up creating the alignments of all the major unit circle hybrids. Here are 4 examples of how this cool quirk of geometry can be used. Major thanks to Charlie for the help in figuring this one out.

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Taking a concept I've done and done to death, I wanted to add some out of phase flavoring to it. Taking the idea of the same time same direction hybrid Yuta taught me at Firedrums last year, I'm switching it up so that each hand has a different axis to perform its petals on and working through them in quarters. It's got a nifty quarter-time feel to it even as the poi stay in same time same direction all the way around.

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This is something Charlie showed me nearly a year ago and that I hadn't really been working on that hard until recently. Geometrically, it's possible to go through each vertex of an octahedron without repeating any segments and Charlie had created an exercise wherein one does plane-shifts between each of these vertices to define an octahedron via constant 90 degree shifts. Here I demo two of the easier variants in same time same direction, split time same direction, and Charlie's preferred method of quarter-time. Be forewarned: this shit is hard!

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Here's an attempt to tie together a whole bunch of different threads from some recent videos both myself and some others have made. First up, e6 posted a video over the weekend about timing and direction where he pointed out the difficulties in making the traditional T&D combinations work with flowers that have an odd number of petals. In an odd bit of synchronicity, Justin Benson posted a video displaying an example of just that--wherein he takes a pentagram into split opposites by creating two pentagrams that reflect each other across a given axis.

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A couple cool ideas based upon triquetra vs pendulum, which kind of fudges the triquetra pattern to create something more akin to two different flowers cut and pasted together. Here I take the same idea and apply it to triquetras and 6-petal antispin flowers to create a new composite and hybridize it both with another triquetra and triquetra's inspin equivalent: 1-petal inspin. Note to self: when recording a video on St. Patrick's Day, do the video before the drinking begins--otherwise I talk a record sped up to double speed :-P

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Last week Charlie posted a video to the Facebook Tech Poi Group of an 8-step CAP based in a 2-petal inspin vs 4-petal antispin hybrid. Having encountered this hybrid before when learning same time same direction hybrids from Yuta at last year's Firedrums, I realized that for any hybrid where you combine an inspin and antispin flower that have the same number of downbeats, they will maintain a constant timing and direction all the way around the pattern. Here are three examples in both same time same direction and split time same direction.

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I ran across a cool performance video of Yuta in the Flowspace last week that reminded me of something I'd begun playing with months ago but hadn't pursued very far: moves that involve wrapping one or both poi around their own hand. I spent a good portion of the weekend playing around with these moves in same time same direction and split time same direction, pulling out some moves I've seen both Ronan and Yuta do in their performances as well as and idea of my own.

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In New York I had a funky breakthrough wherein I realized I could stick a horizontal cateye vs iso hybrid on either end of the horizontal stall stacking move Charlie came up with based upon Mel's pattern at Wildfire. Knowing this, I tied together a bunch of threads from the past couple months using moves that all incorporate this hybrid and thus treat it as a transition tool to get between them. Some cool things came out of playing with this.

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