Another set of ideas that came out of geeking at Wildfire with Noel and Charlie: this time using point isolations matched up with pendulum stalls to create a fascinating isolation effect when switching from side to side with pendulums. We also found the same movement rendered a unit circle apart yields a funky S-curve that could be used for timing and direction changes with the pendulums. Fun! :)

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This weekend at Wildfire included a whole slew of point-isolating moves from Noel. One of which was an interesting 1.5 pattern that I tried to learn and this is what came out. Charlie thinks it's different than what Noel was doing, but unfortunately I didn't get it on camera so I've no way to be sure. Either way, however, here it is: a reverse 1.5 with unit circle spacing that uses poi head/hand contact to switch into a stacking move on each side.

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The last day at Firedrums, Alien Jon, Yuta, and I were playing with a pattern I could not for the life of me get: it's a switch that Ronan does between adjacent pendulum vs. CAP hybrids using a move in the middle I couldn't make out (he does it at 3:09 of his BJC performance video). After a couple weeks of futzing with it, I found the solution quite on accident--the middle move is cateye vs pendulum, a bizarre hybrid Ronan taught in one of his classes at Firedrums.

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I'm back from Firedrums and managed to get a lot of footage of the event, though not nearly all the footage that I wanted to capture. One of the classes I really enjoyed was Russ's class on hybrids, though I think the patterns he taught us were actually much closer to being CAPs. Here are the patterns from that class--enjoy! :)

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I thought I would mark the occasion of having been spinning poi for 3 years with some fire, glow, and a flow practice I did on the beach in St. Thomas. :)

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After posting tech blog #71, I realized I could easily take the top stall that was giving me so many problems and use it to transition into the pendulum stall down maneuver I already had down to create kind of a funky waterfall effect. As was pointed out in comments, this move also provides an excellent point of entry for Ronan's pendulum stall stacking move from BJC--that transition is demoed here as well.

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For a few weeks I'm going to change my format a little bit and rather than doing a weekly update with all the tricks I've been working on, do updates for individual tricks. It should keep my running time down and mean more frequent updates. Sound off in the comment section and tell me if you like the change or not.

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 First up, a tip last week from a commenter on this blog gave me a critical piece of the puzzle for the isolated weave. It's not perfect, but it's at least recognizable as what it is now. Next, based upon the concept of doing a plane-bent "asterisk" like G does, at a recent spin jam it was suggested that one could think of the radiating spokes as behaving like the petals in flowers, so here are examples of two timing and direction combinations of this idea.

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Though I've long admired them, I haven't until recently taken the plunge into really learning float throws. Here are a couple variants I spent much of the holidays working on. The first is a plane-shifting throw wherein you switch the poi into horizontal plane at the height of the float and catch them as they rotate. The other involves reversing the orientation of one's hands before catching the poi such that you catch them with one hand behind your back. Needless to say, both of these still need a lot of work.

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poiboi07 posted another sweet tech blog and I'm cribbing the first trick shamelessly from him. It's a pendulum vs. CAP hybrid that one then uses to perform a Yuta-style horizontal stall around either in a complete circle or 180 degrees. I'm finding it's a fun way to do an almost weave style turn back and forth and have added a vertical stall shift to the mix, making it an easy move to switch around in all three planes.

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