The last day at Firedrums, Alien Jon, Yuta, and I were playing with a pattern I could not for the life of me get: it's a switch that Ronan does between adjacent pendulum vs. CAP hybrids using a move in the middle I couldn't make out (he does it at 3:09 of his BJC performance video). After a couple weeks of futzing with it, I found the solution quite on accident--the middle move is cateye vs pendulum, a bizarre hybrid Ronan taught in one of his classes at Firedrums.

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This blog is going to be on something a little different: hardware. For most of the past year I've used rubber feet as the handles for my fire poi with some form of string connecting them to the swivels in my chains. It's worked pretty well, but I've been worried about the strings I started with (shoe laces) breaking or catching on fire, so I tried using colecord instead. While the colecord was ridiculously comfortable, it's also the least resilient material I've used thus far. After only a month and a half, my current cords are already fraying.

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Another move from this year's Firedrums. Kate from Florida came up with this one, that takes the old stall chase exercise and adds a twist to it by switching between the stall chase and a split-time opposites stall. It reminds me a bit of another variant on the stall chasing that Mel does, but has a rather unique flair that I dig. Enjoy! :)

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My last day at Firedrums I got in a one-on-one geeking session with Yuta and he showed me this lovely number. It's funky because it utilizes a type of spinning that we usually train ourselves out of very early on as poi spinners--same time same direction. Yuta's been playing with using this to create funky hybrid flowers similar to the type that Cyrille does with split-time same direction. This also evidently is where the static spin BTH vs CAP hybrid comes from. Enjoy!

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I'm back from Firedrums and managed to get a lot of footage of the event, though not nearly all the footage that I wanted to capture. One of the classes I really enjoyed was Russ's class on hybrids, though I think the patterns he taught us were actually much closer to being CAPs. Here are the patterns from that class--enjoy! :)

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Before I take off for Firedrums for the week, I wanted to post a little tech bit I got the inspiration for last week. We take G's hybrid stall out of the C-CAP as the root of a plane shift into CAPs behind the back and head. Arms are same-time opposites and poi are split-time same direction. Done cleanly I think this would make for a real eye-popping stunt and it sets up perfectly for returning to the original C-CAP in wheel plane.

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I thought I would mark the occasion of having been spinning poi for 3 years with some fire, glow, and a flow practice I did on the beach in St. Thomas. :)

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In a strange bit of zeitgeist, I ran cross the same idea from two different poi spinners who I'm relatively sure had never spoken of the idea between each other this past weekend while I was in San Francisco. When dealing with 4-sided polygons in spinning, as one tends to with antispin flowers, elliptical CAPs, and any 9-square theory items, you wind up with two similar but difficult to transition between patterns: box and diamond mode. If we expand these out to octagonal figures, however, the issues switching between modes diminishes significantly in complexity.

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I've spent a bunch of time playing with the CAP vs BTH static spin hybrid this past week and realizing the transitions in and out of it are vastly easier than I thought. In fact, one can make a very cool and clean looking transition from either extension or antispin in the direction of the poi straight into this combo and back out. In particular, I like the way this works with opposites split-time.

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A couple months ago I posted a video using plane-bends to switch between inspin and antispin flowers. G saw the vid and suggested I try the same technique in split-time same direction, so here it is! My right side isn't as clean as my left side, but I still think it's a cool effect. Enjoy!

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