A fun move Keith Marshall came up with at IgNight--simple and yet quite elegant. The essential elements are to take vertically displaced hands working in split-opposites and use an extension and float to suggest a moment of split-time same direction before dropping the previously top hand via float into a static spin down below. Ronan, Thomas, and I all totally swooned for this when Keith came up with it.

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This is one of those really obvious a ha moments I can't believe I didn't catch onto earlier: most of the transitions out of triquetra vs pendulum I've played with thus far have been at either the top, bottom, or side positions of the move. But if you attempt a transition at 45 degrees off of the top position, the poi heads are in the perfect position for a quarter-time transition! Here are three patterns that make use of this phenomenon.

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Do all even beat hybrids have an accompanying body tracer? That's the question I posed after playing around with some of the body tracers Ted Petrosky taught in his workshop on the same topic at FLAME Festival. After tweaking one of the tracers he'd taught just slightly, I realized it was very similar to a body tracer I'd learned from Thomas "Nevisoul" Johansson. The original tracer he'd taught me turned out to also function as a 4-petal antispin vs 2-petal inspin hybrid.

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Featuring Kate McCoy! Kate taught an awesome class on fishtails at FLAME Festival near Atlanta, GA and we had some really cool breakthroughs in the course of it. One of which was a combo that utilized triquetra vs pendulum wherein the pendulum is performed with a fishtail pendulum. This made me think of a pendulum vs CAP, which sets you up for an interesting passing move wherein you switch which hand is holding which part of the poi.

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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 :)

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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 couple years ago when I was traveling through Africa, my host wrote a computer program for me that worked both as a poi simulator as well as a mathematical tool for measuring the distance a poi head travels in each hypo and epitrochoid pattern I could dream up at the time. After comparing a lot of the numbers the program created, it turns out there are some really fascinating harmonic relationships that emerge when you combine moves that normally wouldn't go together as a result of a lack of alignment with either the poi heads or hands.

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A few months ago, I did a video on single-hand wraps (called shotguns) in split-time same direction and same time same direction. I didn't show off split opposites at the time because I didn't know how to make it work, but now I do. The trick is you don't actually complete one of the shotguns! These become more stalls than shotguns, but they still have the intended effect.

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I got a request a few months ago for a tutorial on this trick--it's basically a 4-beat corkscrew with some elements of body tracing thrown in for good measure. Not too terribly difficult when you break it into component bits, but it involves the body in ways that are hella cool to watch.

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Here's a move that came out of a skill exchange I had over the weekend with Charles Hinton in Atlanta. He showed me a nifty pendulum-based move that was designed to teach BTB air wraps. I didn't have a lot of luck with the pattern as he'd laid it out, but I decided to work out a different approach to air wraps behind the back and have had some limited successes.

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A follow-up to last weeks video on the triangle third-order antibrid. I started modeling the shapes that are generated by putting various third-order motions over antispin flowers and came up with some intriguing results. Here are third-order antibrids for cateye, triquetra, 4-petal antispin, and an inspin version of the triquetra one.

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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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