Taking a thread from last week's video that included some fun uses of point isolations, here are a few that utilize the split-opposites timing and include either horizontal cateyes or pendulum vs CAP.

techblog301.mp4

I've done a lot of tutorials now on moves for beginners, but this is something that I think is equally if not more important: developing plane control. You'll never learn a move that doesn't require it and there will never come a time when you don't need to practice them. Here are three drills to help you get down your plane control and make your tricks that much prettier.

planecontroltutorial.mp4

These are just a few fun pendulum-based moves I was working with over the weekend, including two based on patterns learned from Ronan at the Tahoe Flow Festival in September.

techblog299.mp4

Following up on last week's video of the pentagram inversion, here's a similar move that's Zan's Diamond as a toroid and a couple fun combos that can be used with it. Plus which I'm playing around a bit with my format--tell me what you think!

techblog298.mp4

Here's two different approaches to 4-beat thread the needles. The first is to do what I'd refer to as the "reach around" 4-beat wherein you wrap your hands around each other. The second is much more akin to body tracing wherein the extra beat puts the poi behind your body.

4beatttntutorial.mp4

It took me a very long time to learn airwraps--the usual wisdom, that when you wrap up a pair poi and they automatically unwrap never really worked for me. Even more confusing to me was how some folks could wrap their poi both ways. I'd tried doing it in an introverted kind of place and had an epically hard time of it.

techblog297.mp4

This was a nifty idea hatched over the weekend: toroid pentagrams and inversions tend to be moves with the same number of beats, so can they be mashed up together? The answer apparently is yes! This took a whole lot of practice and doing to make a reality, but the result is a pentagram being used as one side of a series of inversions--a great mashup of at least three different techniques I've played with on my tech blog in the past few months.

techblog296.mp4

Following up on some of the threads from #293, here's a few weave-based moves switched into an atomic context with vertical vs horizontal planes. Funny thing: the inversion in atomics utilizes a tangle arrangement whereas these weaves utilize an atom arrangement--in other words, they possess opposite polarities, to borrow a term from Tracy Wilhelm.

techblog295.mp4

It's been quite a long time since I've uploaded a flow video and the unusually warm weather we've had in DC the past couple weeks inspired me to get out and put a few things to video. Things to look out for: lots of single poi manipulations, toroids, inversions, and more!

flow10212012.mp4

Any time two planes overlap (read: are not parallel), they overlap in one of four different ways: cranes, butterflies, atoms, or tangles. In the first three arrangements, it's possible to keep the poi rotating without interfering with each other. I'm pretty sure that any and all tangles result from the final atom shape. Here's a handy-dandy diagram that breaks this down in an easy-to-read fashion: http://www.drexfactor.com/sites/default/files/atomicclashes.jpg

techblog294.mp4