Another cool idea Mireneye showed me at Firedrums: elongating the cross point of a weave to make it seem as though you are floating through the middle of the pattern. A slightly different version of this same pattern has what looks like a split-opposites antispin flower in the middle.

techblog338.mp4

One of my favorite parts of Firedrums was catching up with one of my very favorite spinners from back when I first got into tech: Mireneye from Sweden. Randomly one day he was playing around with a particular hybrid that utilized a point isolation and I suggested he try keeping his hands together during the pattern. Magic ensued and we also worked out a poi to hand relationship hybrid of the same type.

techblog337.mp4

So here's an interesting thing you can do with plane bending: if you displace a 4-petal antispin flower in three dimensions such that it changes plane as it enters and exits a petal, you wind up creating an interesting illusion wherein from one perspective it continues to look like a 4-petal antispin flower but from another it looks like a 2-petal inspin flower. You can use this, then, to create patterns where you're not only spinning a different type of flower from a different perspective, but also a different timing and direction.

techblog335.mp4

This is a folding line that Keith Marshall taught me this past weekend as we waited for a bus. It comes from an outer forearm roll that rolls past the shoulder back to cradle, so it sets up the potential of chaining many of the same rolls together for infinite folding lines.

techblog333.mp4

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.

techblog331.mp4

After uploading my vid on isobend hybrids (http://youtu.be/o20Lmbo8nn0), Kory San pointed out to me that there would be at least two variants on each pattern because the isobends can be performed either with the poi always rotating away from the performer or toward. With that in mind, here is a demo of all hand T&D with the poi moving both inward, outward, and both (which in some cases yields movement in split-same and in some cases yields movement in opposites).

techblog329.mp4

A nifty idea picked up from Conway Jennings when he was last in DC--switching the direction of a CAP vs static spin BTH to get different antibrid combinations. It creates the same sort of relationship between hand and poi that CAP vs pendulum does, but with a cool BTH element.

techblog327.mp4

There's been a lot of questions about this on the Facebook Tech Poi Group, so I thought I'd do a video on nothing but what defines probend toroids and how they can be constructed. Think of them as a whole long of two-beat weaves daisy-chained together ;)

techblog325.mp4

Mashing up the isobend-4 toroid with all the even-petalled flowers, here are all timing and direction combinations, including both wheel and wall plane together opposites. For the background on isobend toroids and how they relate to antibend and probend, check out this video here: http://youtu.be/IrS-NdpnEHo

techblog323.mp4

Inspired by a recent photograph of some really gorgeous toroid triangles put together (https://s3.amazonaws.com/com.offerpop.datastore/276469/UhwaNA.png) I went on a little bit of a quest to put together a bunch of different toroid triangle orientations and found fun ways to integrate them into my spinning in surprising ways, including plane shifting and inversions.

techblog321.mp4

As promised: here is a breakdown of how to perform a split-opposites inversion in wheel plane. It's helpful to think of it as the path of the inversion being tilted up and around so that the rules we're used to get reversed for the hand that is going backwards.

techblog318.mp4

This is one of those tricks I've seen and lusted after for the past year--I finally had the chance to put in some concerted work on it and it wound up not being as hard as I feared. The most important insight when it comes to this move is realizing that it's essentially a body tracer performed as a contact trick. Once you've got that part down, the rest fits together easily.

techblog317.mp4