Charlie Cushing's company LanternSmith has really carved itself out a rather unique niche among poi spinners for creating really comfortable and functional handles. The company's latest efforts are similar in form factor to PX3 knobs but are made of silicone and are wonderfully soft and grippy. Here, Ted Petrosky and I review the handles after an afternoon spent playing with them. You can pick them up here: http://www.lanternsmith.com/poi_ropedart_meteor/pom_grip.html

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Following up on a great suggestion from TZ Rogers, Charlie Cushing and I spent the last couple fire festivals working on coming up with a way to use Lanternsmith's handles for fire poi. The benefits are that the silicone handles feel great in the hand and because they glow in the dark they're difficult if not impossible to lose. To achieve the weight I prefer for my handles, we wound up cutting a handle in half but it's worked out well enough Charlie is going to start molding handles to that form factor.

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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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