Whoa...white balance what? Anys, I've done a lot of videos lately on the concept of the toroid flower, and I wanted to revisit it from a place of flow--that is how toroid flowers can be combined with other types of spinning, specifically the 2D spinning we're more traditionally used to. Outlined here are two methods: plane-bending a toroid into the traditional plane orientation or imagining toroids that overlap on a single point and therefore create a junction to switch from one to another. Happy flowing! :)

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200 tech blogs! This one is on how I've been working to create the hybrid families I've been frequently featuring in my videos over the course of the past year--I have two methods I use these days and this is the more visual one: finding the "lines" of the poi tricks to figure out how to switch between them. Sorry for the weird cuts--I had to get it under 15 minutes :-P

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In Tahoe, G showed me this nifty interior stall pattern he'd been playing with that I'd at first thought to be a mere curiosity. It involved searching for transitions where the hands were crossed and so were the poi, but as we continued to play with it, a nifty hybrid pattern came out and later G pointed out that Ronan's triquetra fractal could be used as an intermediary trick. Here are all the transitions we found that week.

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A cool challenge popped up on the Tech Poi Group on Facebook about two weeks ago: the possibility of doing a triquetra hybrid that would incorporate the plane-bent triangle flower I've showed off now in a couple videos. David Foregger was kind enough to model it using his poi simulator and based on that I was able to sort out this pattern. The triangle here needs some cleaning up, but the gist of the move is definitely there. With the polishing I think this will be a really cool looking hybrid.

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Last week at the Tahoe Flow Arts Festival I got to take a nifty class from Ronan on advanced flowers. The class was really centered around creating the kinds of fractal motions that Damien has been referring to as third-order motions and that have a variety of other names. Zan's diamond is one example and it's shown here accompanied by the technique Ronan uses to get there. Even more intriguing were fractal breakdowns for triquetras and box-mode flowers. The triquetra fractal really has my brain running in particular. It's demoed here in 3 different timing and direction combinations.

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My second post-BM wrap up. Here's a couple moves I was playing with on the playa. I'm still digging on the hybrid family approach to finding transitions between moves and here are two that jumped out at me as I was playing in center camp. both are triquetra vs. pendulum combos, but one is at unit circle distance and another is with a hand-to-hand relationship. The unit circle distance one incorporates a stacking pattern from a recent tech blog--the combination of which is so delicious I haven't been able to stop playing with it since I found it.

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Watch out--this one's long! Over the weekend I experienced a few epiphanies about toroid flowers and it seemed like a good opportunity to do a video that would pull together all the different toroids I'd worked on in the past year and throw a little bit of theory out there to unite them all together into a more cohesive whole. The basis of it is thinking about toroid shapes as products of tracing the path an observer makes through space as they walk around a sphere that is moving around another object, like a planet or moon.

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A random bit of inspiration: I picked up a book a lot of friends have recommended to me at the closing sale of the Borders close to where I teach poi in Silver Spring called Quadrivium. It includes chapters on sacred geometry and platonic solids as well as a device that was the 19th century equivalent of the spirograph: the harmonograph.

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Months ago I did a couple tech blogs on toroid flowers, that is flowers that are created by constantly plane-bending the poi around a circular hand path. The resulting corkscrew motion then loops back in upon itself, suggestion a circular tube and hence a toroid. Charlie and Ted had suggested to me that there was an antispin variant on this flower and showed it to me at Fall Wildfire last year. It's come up again both because it means our conception of inspin toroidal flowers was off and because it turns out it's closely related to some of the Arashi-based tech I've played with of late.

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Included in this odds and ends collection: a few variants on horizontal pendulum stall stacking and by popular demand some of the Arashi tech I've had on the blog lately rendered with glow so you can see the trails of the poi as they go along. Finally, a nifty hybrid e6 and I worked on this weekend--taking Arashi tech and hybridizing it with trochoid spinning. The result is ultra bizarre, but I think looks really cool.

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