So here's an interesting thing you can do with plane bending: if you displace a 4-petal antispin flower in three dimensions such that it changes plane as it enters and exits a petal, you wind up creating an interesting illusion wherein from one perspective it continues to look like a 4-petal antispin flower but from another it looks like a 2-petal inspin flower. You can use this, then, to create patterns where you're not only spinning a different type of flower from a different perspective, but also a different timing and direction.

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It's been six years since poi entered by life and changed it forever more. I've learned a lot in that time--enough to know how much there still is to learn ;) This is just a showcase of some of my favorite things I have learned in that time. I will confess that contrary to my aims, this is not a single unbroken take, but a composite of three. Thanks everyone for watching! I can't wait for what the next six years will bring ;)

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While spending time spinning with Keith Marshall, he strongly implored me to even out my contact tricks--practicing each roll and fold with each hand. He showed me a drill to work out folding lines with each hand, but I realized it only encompassed half a fold. This is my version of the same drill, including the line fold in each direction for each hand.

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A couple months ago I was sent a request for more intermediate-level tutorials via Facebook and I had kind of mixed feelings about it. On the one hand, I knew I could provide the content, but I also knew that I considered intermediate spinning to have slightly different qualities than the person requesting the tutorials may have had in mind. To me, intermediates begin seeing poi as being composed of smaller and more fundamental pieces of movement.

This is a folding line that Keith Marshall taught me this past weekend as we waited for a bus. It comes from an outer forearm roll that rolls past the shoulder back to cradle, so it sets up the potential of chaining many of the same rolls together for infinite folding lines.

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Something I spotted in a video of Ted Petrosky made me think of this--he did a cool body tracer around his shoulders (if memory serves, I've seen Michael Parisi doing the same tracer) and it occurred to me that the top part could be combined with a C-CAP faced downward to create a cool variant on BTH static vs CAP.

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This is one of those moves I've had on the "to-do" list now for a year or two. In the early days of my tech blog, I spent several videos getting the reverse isolated weave down. This is the forwards version. The helpful piece of this puzzle came from Ronan last summer, when he suggested I think of it as being similar to a five-beat weave.

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This is kinda retro tech, but it still leads to some fun places. Using static spin vs 1-petal inspin creates a moment that makes for an easy transition to a split-same isolation. You can use that moment to switch to static spin vs 1-petal inspin with each hand's role reversed or any number of patterns that use linear isolations through the body center.

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After uploading my vid on isobend hybrids (http://youtu.be/o20Lmbo8nn0), Kory San pointed out to me that there would be at least two variants on each pattern because the isobends can be performed either with the poi always rotating away from the performer or toward. With that in mind, here is a demo of all hand T&D with the poi moving both inward, outward, and both (which in some cases yields movement in split-same and in some cases yields movement in opposites).

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Trying to think about plane-bending in a different context than toroids and harmonics--like using them as a way to switch direction on a particular trick. The concept reminds me a bit of Nicky Evers' wavy weaves.

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