After seeing a Nick Woolsey instructional vid on how to do the triquetra the other day, I discovered a figure I really dug under the wikipedia entry for the word triquetra (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triquetra) called a Carolingian Cross, which essentially amounts to a compound interlacing triquetra. I've spent a good portion of the week dissecting the figure and trying to figure out how to render it with poi. Here are three of the options I've played with.

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Wow...seriously love this shot, Abject--thanks so much for taking these and for the great conversation on Saturday night! :)

In my last blog posting, I noted an interesting shape based upon the triquetra I'd found in a wikipedia article and was pretty sure could be accomplished with poi--I've spent most of the past evening and day thinking through how and coming up with different approaches to it.

For most of the past year, I've called this trick a trifoil or antispin flower hybrid, yet somehow overnight the terminology switched to triquetra and I didn't know why until Nick Woolsey posted his latest online tutorial.

I got a request for a tutorial on how to turn with CAPs and found it to be a fun challenge. Here they are approached from the perspective of being fountains in opposite poi motion, wall plane turns that integrate triquetra hybrids, and finally as wheel plane reels--my personal favorite. Enjoy!

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Starting off with a variant on an antispin shape I played around with a few weeks back--this time I'm realizing one can switch back and forth between which hand is doing antispin and which is doing extension on the wrapping and unwrapping--an effect I think is really cool. Next, some more atomic flowers based upon stall patterns and a switch that I didn't realize I'd ripped off from Insignia. Finally, some hybrid turns with the triquetra--vs. pendulum and vs. static spin.

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Lots more stuff this week. I've got working transitions from the triquetra vs pendulum hybrid into CAPs from all four corners, though all are still ugly. When integrated into flow, however, I'm looking forward to seeing what this move can do.

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Lots of stuff from Firedrums last week--first off a few variants on the pendulum-triquetra hybrid that I've played with before, including switching up the timing of the hands to split-time opposites. Based upon a linear extension approach to this hybrid, an interesting pattern Baz came up with the last night at FD that combines the pattern with CAPs and a very sloppy rendition of a variant on this idea that I think may lead to reworking all the triquetra-halving patterns I've played with so far.

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Definitely a smorgasboard of tricks this week. The first is a repeating triangle pattern done that is repeated at 90 degree angles to reveal what looks to me like a pinwheel, though the trick takes so long to render the idea may be irrelevant for performance. I tried it this past weekend and got a good response, though. I don't know what to call the next trick--I think it ultimately breaks down to halving the triquetra in split-time horizontally. Most of us know the vertical variation, but the horizontal one requires some arm-crossing action.

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Lots of Triquetra action this week! First up, more extrapolations of the figure-8 concept. This time a conflation of the figures Insignia and I have been playing with to get continuous figures that repeat no line segments and still work within the diamond pattern. Next, that cool cross pattern Zan is doing at the beginning of the Arizona Transmission video is demystified (well, it was mysterious to me). Finally, a 360 triquetra--something I theorized about months ago and have just now gotten to the point that I can pull it off.

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