When I did my tutorial on 3 poi weaves a couple weeks ago, I thought the waistwrap would be switching between thumb led and poi led, but at Wildfire I was shown it's much easier to keep the move in thumb led when making this turn. It feels a little awkward to me, but makes up for it in making the move smoother overall and this effect really comes across in the 360 degree turns you do with it.

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Last weekend at Wildfire I taught at 3-poi class that essentially turned into a skill share and one of the cooler things I saw during said skill share was Noel showing us how to do a 3-beat weave with a superman. It's not hard to get there and it sets up both the possibility of doing the weave as an atomic as well as a 4-beat variant. I don't know if a 5-beat is possible, but it would sure be a challenge!

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This is one of those moves I've had on the "to-do" list now for a year or two. In the early days of my tech blog, I spent several videos getting the reverse isolated weave down. This is the forwards version. The helpful piece of this puzzle came from Ronan last summer, when he suggested I think of it as being similar to a five-beat weave.

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This week we're going to talk about waistwraps, which are a way of adapting three-beat weaves into a wall plane orientation. They require having your turns in both directions down, but the trick is that you'll always be turning across your body in the same direction so that you stay facing the audience.

waistwrapstutorial.mp4

In editing Keith Marshall's portion of the Top 10 of 2012 video, I spotted him performing this nifty variant on a no-beat throw weave that utilizes antispin to get the toss from point A to point B and thought it would make for an excellent tech blog! The key to getting this down is to flick the handle up like it's an isolated toss when the under hand comes around to make its throw.

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The archer weave is a fun embellishment for the three-beat weave that leads directly into body tracing and a number of other fun techniques. When I first tried to learn it, I was baffled at how it could work. Here is an easy way to break it down so that you can see what makes this move tick.

archerweavetutorial.mp4

Performing an introverted weave forces the planes into an atomic configuration, but it got me to wonder if one had the option of choosing what the atomic configuration would be. I went ahead and tried to produce a weave analogous to an introverted weave but in a H vs V  (horizontal versus verticale) arrangement rather than V vs V (vertical versus vertical). The result not only worked wonderfully, but also demonstrated there are two variants on this move: one for each direction the horizontal poi can rotate.

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Taking up a challenge from Kai McHaggerty after I posted my first video on a toroid triangle weave to come up with a version of this move wherein both hands are performing a toroid triangle, here it is with both hands performing two toroid triangles in the course of a weave. Fun challenge :)

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Another attempt to merge together toroids with weaves and inversions--this one takes a simple two-beat weave and adds a toroid triangle to it.

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5-beat weaves are an occasionally-helpful tool to add to your weave belt but they do involve retraining your arms somewhat how to perform a weave. Here's a step-by-step of how you can do this.

5beatweavetutorial.mp4