Over the weekend, e6 posted an awesome video exploring the toroid flower concept and really cleaning up some of the work with it to the point that the shapes are really reading and finding definition as something unique. It's inspired a lot of experiments this week, but I wanted to start with laying out all the four timing and direction combinations for these types of flowers. You can see Erik's original video here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bHsUwal8Ms0

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A few weeks ago, Arashi asked me to post this video I'd taken of the first seven minutes of his class at Firedrums. My camera was running out of battery at the time, so regrettably I didn't get much more, but you all might appreciate some Arashi tech straight from the horse's mouth :)

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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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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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By popular request, here is the breakdown of how I do the plane-bendy diagonal thing from my last odds and ends video. It's essentially just a corkscrew with a lockout on either side that has been plane-bent to put the lockouts in a diagonal plane. One of the cool things about this, then, is that it integrates well with another diagonal plane-bending move that Alien Jon demoed in the Arizona Transmission video a couple years ago.

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A bunch of random combos I've been working on in the past couple months. The stacking stuff was based upon playing with the idea of leash tracing with the head or hand--something that came out of a move Charlie showed me at Fall WF last year, as well as maintaining right angles in the orientation of the poi to each other. The second stacking combo is very similar to the first, but there's a small difference in the timing that makes the difference between the tracing and actually having a moment where the right angle is seen in full relief.

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Erik (e6) made a request on the Facebook Tech Poi Group for those of us who regularly post tech blogs to post vids of what drills we happen to be playing with these days. Here are three drills that run the gamut of contact to plane-bending.

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Part 3 of my Arashi wrap-up series from Firedrums. In this video we talk about creating longer and larger versions of the patterns from the first two videos by using cateyes instead of static spin circles to keep the patterns from overlapping with one's body.

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