In this video: choosing head weight, tether length and type, and handle weight. I got some great feedback from the last video and it led to this--a deeper exploration of each of the poi components and the options that are available for them.

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Never picked up a set of poi before? This is the video for you! This is a video to familiarize you with the hardware and how it can be held. No matter what set of poi you pick up, this tutorial should help you get to know this tool and how you interact with it.

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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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w00t for the new flowcord! Some of you guys may have noticed that about three months ago I switched up the leashes on my contact poi from the colecord I'd been using for more than a year. The reason was I dropped by the Flowspace in Berkeley, California after Burning Man and Sean and I spent an afternoon figuring out how to make this awesome new type of cord they had work with my contact poi. I'm pleased to announce those experiments were successful and now you can buy kits to create these leashes and handles straight from Flowtoys themselves! 

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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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I've cleaned up the top and bottom CAPs from last week such to the point they're at least recognizable as this now. The next step will be to integrate them with the CAP-float pattern Insignia and I have been playing with to be able to do both the diamond hybrid pattern and bisect it like a cross as Zan is doing in the Arizona Transmission video. I got some feedback on my butterfly antispin flowers--especially in how they've been integrating into my CAP patterns and have come to realize I'm doing the wrong kind of flower. Back to the drawing board on that one.

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