Sorry I've disappeared! Last week was really intense and I didn't have a chance to do a video blog. This is based upon a trick Ted from New York posted in a video a few weeks ago wherein he was switching to iso vs horizontal cateye at each of the side petals of an opposites split-time antispin flower. Continuing with the antispin flower means that the hands have to exit on the opposite side of the unit circle they enter from, so you have to exit after half a turn, or add a half turn to every complete rotation of the trick.

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Another one of those funky things that's come out of the Facebook Tech Poi Group: a type of CAP based around an S-shaped handpath. You have to slightly change how you approach the antispin section to put the poi head in the right place. Here I demonstrate a couple patterns that utilize this shape with hands going split opposites. The first one is pretty clean but the second one needs work :-P These also mesh really well with a variant of G's floating triquetra pattern.

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On Halloween weekend I got to spend some quality time spinning with some of my favorite spinners on the East Coast. One of them, Baz, came up with this funky move, which I recorded and edited into a video of our fun that day. A few people have asked how it's accomplished--it's essentially a 1.5 weave with a horizontal cateye substituted for a static spin. You can perform this either by having the poi head drop below the other poi head midway through the horizontal cateye, or complete the cateye to keep the move within the unit circle.

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Last weekend we were fortunate to have a bunch of folks from out of town who utterly kick ass at their tools to play with. Lots of fun stuff came out of it when we got together for a spin jam on Sunday--here's a couple of the ideas we toyed with. Here we start off with hybrids and try to keep them continuous even as we are throwing one poi around. I'm finding it's easiest to use the poi tracing the smaller circle for this operation. Here we have static vs. extension and iso vs. extension with hands together.

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Had a chat with Noel on the Facebook Tech Poi group last week about cateye vs pendulum hybrids, more specifically those involving hand orbits rather than head orbits and wanted to try and find a way to perform the former given that I could already do the latter. Here is what came out: the idea is that you're performing two unit circles side-to-side and alternating which hand is performing them as a cateye and which hand is performing them as a pendulum.

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Christian posted a challenge on the Facebook Tech Poi group this past week asking for CAP vs cateye hybrid possibilities. Never one to back down from a challenge, I started working through it. I'll admit I haven't found anything yet that I feel is really that aesthetically pleasing, but here's what came out nonetheless.

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Wow...I was super exhausted when I recorded this and it came out really sloppy. Hopefully y'all will forgive me for this :-P Anys, over the weekend in an effort to expand my vocabulary in horizontal plane, I tried adapting one of my favorite moves in vertical plane: back-to-back triquetras, and stick it into horizontal plane. Here are four variants: the first is just to take the move exactly as it is and bring the hands together near the head as you're switching back to the original position. Watch out! It's REALLY easy to club yourself in the head with this move.

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Just a funky pattern I played around with Sunday with Erik that it turns out yields some cool looking tunneling/composites. I took some video of the two of us doing the pattern together that I'll hopefully get posted in the next week. This is just a step-by-step of how the move is done.

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At PDF, Joe Graff showed me a most fascinating move he'd been working on ever since he saw Pineapple Pete and G's video "The Airwrap Reloaded" in which the two posit that the airwrap is the oldest type of plane bend in poi. Taking a cue from this, Joe used an airwrap to plane bend into planes that were 90 degrees offset, resulting in an atomic. I found that with a little tweaking, this same combo could be used to reverse the direction of the airwrap as well.

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Ironically I've been running across a lot of tricks lately that involve airwrap transitions, so I'm making it a theme of the coming week. Here are two such moves: one that was theorized but not performed at Wildfire involves catching the poi in the shoulder and hand cradle that Marvin demonstrated at Burning Man, but then catching it in an airwrap when throwing it back out. Ted and I tried unsuccessfully to pull this move off on Friday night, but I've figured out the trick to make it work.

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