I uploaded a crosser tutorial several months ago, but both the audio and video quality were quite sub-par. I had a gap in my tutorial shooting schedule, so I decided to do a better quality video and hope it's of more use in the long run than the other one was :)

crossertutorialredo.mp4

By request: Nick Woolsey actually did a great tutorial on crossers a couple years ago that I think really did an amazing job of summing up how to get the move down. Here's a breakdown of the move that incorporates his advice plus a couple bits aimed at people who may be more beginners than his video was aimed for.

crossertutorial.mp4

A commenter on my video about the crosser archer weave reminded me of a move Kate had demoed last year at Kinetic and in one of Noel's videos. I dug it back up to see what it had in common with the move I'd just played with. The answer: very little, but it was still a hell of a fun challenge :)

techblog248.mp4

Starting with a crosser that unwraps and rewraps via antispin and extension, this trick involves essentially freezing one of the hands on the non-native shoulder to force the other hand to do all the work. In keeping the timing and direction consistent, the result is a body tracer that actually cycles through different positions of an archer weave.

techblog244.mp4

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.

techblog178.mp4

Though I've long admired them, I haven't until recently taken the plunge into really learning float throws. Here are a couple variants I spent much of the holidays working on. The first is a plane-shifting throw wherein you switch the poi into horizontal plane at the height of the float and catch them as they rotate. The other involves reversing the orientation of one's hands before catching the poi such that you catch them with one hand behind your back. Needless to say, both of these still need a lot of work.

techblog65.mp4

This past week, Alien Jon posted a tech blog featuring a funky approach to creating compound circles that bears some similarities to Nick Woolsey's concept of no-beat windmills and how they relate to poi. As I've been playing with it, I've found it's also a funky way to create polyrhythm hybrids.

techblog60.mp4

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.

techblog35.mp4

Some embarrassingly sloppy hybrids that involve isolations, extensions, and cateyes, as well as a couple more variations on meltdowns and crossers.

techblog3.mp4

More 1.5 and pendulum variations, including behind-the-head, a meltdown variant, turning with 1.5 opposites and same direction, and an interesting take on meltdowns. Sorry about the crappy audio--my normal camera wasn't working.

techblog2.mp4