This is totally one of those tricks I didn't know if I was ever going to get, but fortunately Leo's recent video on body tracers showed a possible shortcut that worked out beautifully: by treating each side of a behind the back waistwrap as a 2-beat, one can train each hand to do its part of a behind the back crosser. The result needs some cleaning up, but it's a useful shortcut for folks with inflexible shoulders like my own.

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A couple weeks ago I started playing with a variant on a stacking move I've seen Mel and Poiboi play with, but changed what I perceived the timing and direction of the pattern to be. The result felt asymmetric and so after learning it on both sides, I set about figuring out how to switch between them using a wallplane flower in antispin. I then realized it fits in well with the hybrid family I demoed a couple tech blogs back and threw in a triquetra vs pendulum for good measure.

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Erik (e6) made a request on the Facebook Tech Poi Group for those of us who regularly post tech blogs to post vids of what drills we happen to be playing with these days. Here are three drills that run the gamut of contact to plane-bending.

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Part 3 of my Arashi wrap-up series from Firedrums. In this video we talk about creating longer and larger versions of the patterns from the first two videos by using cateyes instead of static spin circles to keep the patterns from overlapping with one's body.

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This tutorial examines body tracers from the vantage point of thinking of them as two-beat weaves that shift position along the body and starts with a couple basic exercises and the theory behind them and moves into a few examples of the technique in action.

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Months ago I did a couple tech blogs on toroid flowers, that is flowers that are created by constantly plane-bending the poi around a circular hand path. The resulting corkscrew motion then loops back in upon itself, suggestion a circular tube and hence a toroid. Charlie and Ted had suggested to me that there was an antispin variant on this flower and showed it to me at Fall Wildfire last year. It's come up again both because it means our conception of inspin toroidal flowers was off and because it turns out it's closely related to some of the Arashi-based tech I've played with of late.

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This is a months old trick I can't believe I haven't done a tech blog on yet. It came out of Alien Jon, Charlie, and I playing with body tracers when AJ and Charlie were in town back in April. The algorithm for going through this variant on the diamond is a little wonky, but I still think it looks cool. Enjoy! :)

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Here's another hybrid family based upon a particular poi orientation--this one being hands together and poi apart. Triquetra vs pendulum, Mel's horizontal stack, point isolation walking, and stall chasers all make use of this alignment. Like the other hybrid families I've demonstrated on this video blog, it's a great tool for transitions.

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Here's part two of my wrap-up from Arashi's Firedrums class. This covers how you can use the poi plane and cross points to build polygons rather than using the traditional trochoid method of defining polygon sides with an arc and corners with loops/petals. The implications of this are really cool because they allow you to build polygons that present an image in three dimensions rather than the flat shapes we normally work with.

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Here's my first tutorial breaking down some of the tech Arashi laid down in his class at Firedrums. Here we're just dealing with some basic plane-bends that create some nifty diagonal shapes and the concept of using cross points in places we don't normally stick them. You'll see more than a few ideas here that have also popped up in Alien Jon and G vids, so think of this as a basic tutorial on how to start aiming planes as much as we aim flower petals.

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