I'm back to drilling isolations in hopes of getting down the elusive isolated weave, but shooting for lower hanging fruit in the form of the iso to lockout combination guys like Nevisoul and Ronan have made famous. I'm specifically working on getting the isolated bit in the middle locked into the iso position like they have to make it really pop.

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DC finally came out of its deep freeze just in time for a warm MLK Day. I headed down to Dupont Circle for the day to enjoy the sun and do a little free spinning. Enjoy!

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Here's the second installment of my explanation of how hard and soft transitions work with Alien Jon's concept of arcs and loops. Here I demo all the permutations of these transitions through the intratangent circles (concentric) versus extratangent circles (outside--btw, if any mathematicians know what these concepts are actually called, please let me know) for a bunch of different circle sizes.

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The first installment of a short series of vids on transitions between unit circle patterns, antispin flowers, and extensions. What the common elements are and how to switch between them. Most of this vid is defining basic vocabulary and providing basic examples of the concepts that will be explored in later videos. A major debt for this is owed to Alien Jon, whose concepts of arcs and loops is one of, if not the critical underpinning of these concepts.

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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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The studio I teach at has moved from Takoma Park to Silver Spring and we're celebrating the move by offering a week of free classes, including poi!

This is a great opportunity for rote beginners to get free instruction to start them on the road to the playful and challenging world of object manipulation. If you've been wanting to learn or have learned only a couple tricks and would like to learn more, this is the perfect chance!

 First up, the first hoop trick to make it into my tech blog! My friend Katie/Surprise showed my a funky isolation trick that I dug that seemed to have this odd stopping point. Remembering some bits learned from a recent Hoop Path workshop, I realized a body can keep the hoop constantly in motion by jumping one's grip. The demo here is terrible--it's with my old hoop, which weighs a ton. Nonetheless, I swear this one is doable (incidentally, if any hoopers out there know what it's called, please drop a line in my comment box).

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Here's my entry for MCP's Christmas video thread on Home of Poi. DC got dumped with almost two feet of snow and it provided an excellent opportunity to get a unique view of the monuments on the national mall. It was, however, hella cold that night, so regrettably my spinning was neither as clean nor as fast as I would have liked.

Happy holidays, folks :)

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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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 After working through trying to do a mode change in same direction with Charlie's 9-square theory, I came up with an interesting solution that involves using soft transitions across a unit circle grid to switch between box and diamond mode. The idea for this is centered on isopops from hooping and more specifically how you can change circle size by treating them as adjacent circles rather than dilations of the same circle. Included is a demo of how this technique can be used to switch between iso vs cateye antibrid to static vs triquetra antibrid to iso vs extension and back again.

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