This past week at Spin Summit, I noticed Kyle Ford from Chicago doing a really cool toroid-inspired move that struck me as a great use of the technique that was simple and eloquent and would jump out to an audience quite easily. Here's an adaptation of the technique, slightly techie-fied, of course ;)

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A challenge from Jeffrey Bird on the Tech Poi Group on Facebook--he wanted to see Zan's diamond rendered in opposites split-time in toroids. It took a little bit of doing, but I actually think it's far cleaner than the split-time same direction version I demoed a couple weeks ago. Bonus: I also decided to demo the same-time opposites version of the pattern.

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A follow-up from the toroid H concept from a couple weeks ago. This takes the same concept, but makes the toroid a ball instead of planet mode toroid and creates a cool stalling pattern out of it. Short but sweet--it's cold out there!

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This is a challenge that comes courtesy Dave "Honeybear" Foregger. While I was in Boston, he showed me a pentagram vs pentagram hybrid he'd been working on and it set my gears turning. It's a similar challenge to triangle vs triquetra, but the trochoid pentagram must travel much faster to stay in phase with the plane-bent variant, so synchronizing their movements can be a pain. This is also a great use of crane position done in different orientations.

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I know this topic has been done to death, but in trying to come up with a way to classify toroids, I came to realize we've barely scratched the surface of them. Here I use the approach of imagining the axes around which we can move the plane of a toroid as being similar to the major axes inside an octahedron and choosing specific axes that are parallel with the arm, hand path, or neither.

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Whoa...white balance what? Anys, I've done a lot of videos lately on the concept of the toroid flower, and I wanted to revisit it from a place of flow--that is how toroid flowers can be combined with other types of spinning, specifically the 2D spinning we're more traditionally used to. Outlined here are two methods: plane-bending a toroid into the traditional plane orientation or imagining toroids that overlap on a single point and therefore create a junction to switch from one to another. Happy flowing! :)

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A cool challenge popped up on the Tech Poi Group on Facebook about two weeks ago: the possibility of doing a triquetra hybrid that would incorporate the plane-bent triangle flower I've showed off now in a couple videos. David Foregger was kind enough to model it using his poi simulator and based on that I was able to sort out this pattern. The triangle here needs some cleaning up, but the gist of the move is definitely there. With the polishing I think this will be a really cool looking hybrid.

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Watch out--this one's long! Over the weekend I experienced a few epiphanies about toroid flowers and it seemed like a good opportunity to do a video that would pull together all the different toroids I'd worked on in the past year and throw a little bit of theory out there to unite them all together into a more cohesive whole. The basis of it is thinking about toroid shapes as products of tracing the path an observer makes through space as they walk around a sphere that is moving around another object, like a planet or moon.

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A random bit of inspiration: I picked up a book a lot of friends have recommended to me at the closing sale of the Borders close to where I teach poi in Silver Spring called Quadrivium. It includes chapters on sacred geometry and platonic solids as well as a device that was the 19th century equivalent of the spirograph: the harmonograph.

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