This puts together a few threads that came out of Firedrums and Wildfire. It's basically just a couple different approaches to switching which hand is performing pendulum and which is performing triquetra in a hybrid. We can use either 1.5 stacking or a lockout to get us there--or both if we so choose!

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At Wildfire I got a good chance to run my transition theory through the ringer and I got some great feedback from some folks I really respected about it. One of the more fun collaborations was Sunday with Charlie and Justin. Charlie and I essentially hadn't slept and spent most of the day working out the theoretical framework in which hard, soft, and mixed transitions could be applied to plane bending and shifting. We came up with a couple new moves neither of us had ever seen before and laid the foundation for what I hope will be a really nifty expansion of the theory. Thanks, guys! :)

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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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Charlie and I took a chance to play with some composite patterns on Saturday night and really dug the results. We hope you guys do, too.

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Noel and Jordan from the Vulcan crew bust out some partner poi, including composites, partner weaves, and partner flowers Saturday night at Spring Wildfire 2010.

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I've been playing some more with the same time same direction patterns Yuta was showing off at Firedrums and trying to apply the concept to stacking patterns. While technically none of these are true stacks, they share some similarities in concept in how the hands change orientation in relation to each other. Going a bit down the rabbit-hole, here is a pattern that essentially amounts to performing a stack in all four directions and alternating between an antispin and extension transition to do it.

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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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This blog is going to be on something a little different: hardware. For most of the past year I've used rubber feet as the handles for my fire poi with some form of string connecting them to the swivels in my chains. It's worked pretty well, but I've been worried about the strings I started with (shoe laces) breaking or catching on fire, so I tried using colecord instead. While the colecord was ridiculously comfortable, it's also the least resilient material I've used thus far. After only a month and a half, my current cords are already fraying.

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I had a lot of footage from Firedrums that I couldn't get into the video I made last week, so I'm going to post a couple of the things that wound up on the editing room floor this week. Here is Alien Jon teaching a crowd of eager onlookers (including myself) how to create 6-petal antispin flowers out of pieces we're familiar with from box and diamond mode antispin flowers.

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