A few weeks ago, Arashi asked me to post this video I'd taken of the first seven minutes of his class at Firedrums. My camera was running out of battery at the time, so regrettably I didn't get much more, but you all might appreciate some Arashi tech straight from the horse's mouth :)

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I forgot to bring my tripod to the studio, so the vid on finding hybrid families using QFT will have to wait for the next video. In the meantime, here's a nifty transition that takes elements from patterns that Ronan and G play with and merges them together in a fun and creative way. It utilizes CAP vs pendulum and lets you switch which hand is performing which move.

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200 tech blogs! This one is on how I've been working to create the hybrid families I've been frequently featuring in my videos over the course of the past year--I have two methods I use these days and this is the more visual one: finding the "lines" of the poi tricks to figure out how to switch between them. Sorry for the weird cuts--I had to get it under 15 minutes :-P

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An idea from a previous blog I wanted to explore a little bit more: the pendulum stall chasers from a few tech blogs ago included a brief note on using said trick as a transition between horizontal and vertical stacking. Here I explore the transition from the horizontal stack in a little bit more detail, taking my two favorite stacks and figuring out the transitions in and out of them into this pattern.

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I've been mapping out hybrids lately that utilize a relationship between the hands and realized I'd been assuming the handle was synonymous with the hands. I then started to think about cases in which the handles could be together but not necessary have the hands together. The first hybrid I played with seemed too easy, so I started doing it with an outer forearm roll and it led both to  isolation vs extension and triquetra vs pendulum hybrids.

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Over the weekend I started messing around with a slightly different approach to triquetra vs pendulum and found it opened up some transition points I rarely use but found to be really fun to incorporate into my flow. In this case I was playing with triquetra vs pendulum with the hands in opposites same-time and looking to the transition points on either side of the pattern, which can access static vs extension or same time same direction hybrids.

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Here's another trick Ronan was showing off on the playa--based in pendulum vs CAP, he was doing a catch with the poi head that would then be used to shift the center of the pattern to either side. Another option was throwing the poi head vertically to enter static vs triquetra. I don't often play with head catching tricks, but these have a really fascinating capacity for shifting an audience's point of attention.

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In Tahoe, G showed me this nifty interior stall pattern he'd been playing with that I'd at first thought to be a mere curiosity. It involved searching for transitions where the hands were crossed and so were the poi, but as we continued to play with it, a nifty hybrid pattern came out and later G pointed out that Ronan's triquetra fractal could be used as an intermediary trick. Here are all the transitions we found that week.

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Here's a move I demoed in an Odds and Ends video a couple months ago, but was also a huge hit at Burning Man. The idea is to take something that is like a stall chaser and introduce both right angles and pendulum stalls into the mix. This essentially turns the move into a series of stalls done in staggered timing and theoretically also offers a great transition between horizontal stacks and vertical stacks.

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A cool challenge popped up on the Tech Poi Group on Facebook about two weeks ago: the possibility of doing a triquetra hybrid that would incorporate the plane-bent triangle flower I've showed off now in a couple videos. David Foregger was kind enough to model it using his poi simulator and based on that I was able to sort out this pattern. The triangle here needs some cleaning up, but the gist of the move is definitely there. With the polishing I think this will be a really cool looking hybrid.

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