2018 has drawn to a close and once again we have our answer for who made a splash in the poi world this year. There's a lot of stats I want to dive into but first and powerful message with regard to this year's list and the people who voted to make it happen:

Liz Knights finally made it!!! WAHOOO!!! Seriously, it took you guys long enough to vote her on here.

With that said...let's dive in!

We all have this moment: we’re working on something new and unfamiliar and WHAM! The poi hits us.

Some days it’s a minor annoyance and some days it makes us what to tear our hair out and throw the poi down, never to pick them up again.

Even after more than 10 years of spinning, I still have the latter days. I still have those moments when something is so frustrating and feels so unattainable that I have trouble imagining it’ll ever make sense to me.

Life wears us down and tends to tear us away in tiny little pieces, making it hard to remember how full of wonder the world can be.

What's really awesome is when you're able to find moments of beauty through it all. If you leave yourself open to this kind of discovery, you'll find these moments of beauty appearing more often than you might think!

Several weeks ago my girlfriend and I took a vacation to the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico. I will totally admit that I was pretty grumpy and exhausted and wasn't even sure I wanted to go.

I've been in the poi community long enough that I've seen several waves of tricks come through that become cool, then passe, then rediscovered all over again.

When I first started spinning, behind the back tricks were one of those tricks that were absolutely essential if you wanted to be taken seriously as a tech spinner. They've lost a lot of that sheen in the past several years but I still see people on occasion doing creative things with these tricks.

I'm absolutely heartbroken with the news yesterday of Dolores O'Riordan passing. The Cranberries were an incredibly important band for me as a teenager and probably the first band that convinced me that it was worth listening to music that had been recorded after 1973. I took some of that heartache and decided to make it into something beautiful with it. I hope you enjoy it.

2017 was definitely the year of string manipulations and continued our community down the road of fusing poi with juggling. I'm also pleased to see that it is the first year we've had three women in top 10 (can't wait till it's half or more!).

Chris Kelly returned to the top spot after being dethroned by Tim Goddard last year. It should be noted that they were separated by only 3 votes so if this keeps up it'll be anybody's game next year.

A couple years ago I remember running across a blog post by the cellist Zoe Keating. In it she laid out in fairly explicit detail where her income for the past year and come from and how much it amounted to.

The flow arts have grown by leaps and bounds partially thanks to a culture of open source sharing--but that culture may have a darker side. I've seen many online debates over ownership of tricks and a recent conversation with a friend prompted me to reexamine my own stance on the issue.

About a month ago I was sent a very special package!

A company in Atlanta called Mayday ATL is now making fire safety blankets that they hope will make the venerable duvetyne a thing of the past.

Their new blankets are made of aramid fibers, so they're both naturally fire resistant as well as machine-washable. In addition, they feature a trim of reflective material to make them easy to spot in the dark and embroidered personalization.

I decided to put Mayday ATL's blankets to the test in this review--see what I thought of them!

I spent most of the year choreographing it and I got a lot of requests for a video that was just my performance of this piece without the tutorial around it. Here it is with some minimal edits--I hope you enjoy it as much as I enjoyed choreographing it!