What are you working on now?

how do you do a flower? (i feel really stupid asking)

There are people out there who can explain it much better than I (go see Derek's videos in the Learn section!) but in a nutshell you swing the poi in one direction but you move your arm the opposite direction. So if you swing forwards, move your arm backwards and vice versa. It takes practice and there's more than a few variations on it but that's a start. Hope that helps somewhat!

thank you very much

No problem! Derek's vids are good, also try checking out playpoi.com, they have an excellent video section and between those sources you can get a lot of helpful information! The forums here are helpful for information, or at least somebody to sympathize with your learning frustrations but poi is a skill you learn by doing and f---ing up a lot so having something visual to look at is really the best if there is nobody to actually show you tricks.

That's just the antispin, that takes a while to get. I found these ones to be great:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I-sCXbZ4slc
And this one helps a lot with the timing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UXJaMevBPXs&feature=channel

Edit: been working a lot on all my stalls lately, definitely making progress in making then nice solid stalls

It's really weird but I'm finding I have one bad stall. Left hand, downwards, to my left. Always really sloppy, often I don't even manage to stall it completely, especially during this stall combo that's really stunning otherwise. It's kinda weird, really, to have just one of them be so much worse than the others.

Stall combo?

Always happy to hear of new ones....

I'm having difficulty with stalls behind my back, I'm trying to get one where it stalls upwards behind my back doing kind of a basic CAP motion except it's an extension every time, hence that stall.

BUT! My stall coming from the bottom keeps going back instead of up, the one on top is fine.

Probably nothing fancy, but I like the look of vertically stalling from split time same (in wall plane), to split time butterfly, vertical stall again immediately, split time same in the other direction, vertical stall, split time butterfly, repeat a couple times back and forth across wall plane. The same direction spins go through only one orbit, the butterflies only a half orbit. I like to end this recently by going back into split time same, stalling horizontally, one high, one low, pulling it into a corkscrew briefly, stalling into an antispin butterfly flower.

It's a very jagged series of movements, but it goes well with metal and glitch.

For the broadest defintion of a poi flower, you move your arms in circles and at the same time spin the poi in other cirles, to give what Nick Woolsey calls a compound circle. Most of the patterns look at bit like the flowers of a petal if done at night with something that glows.

Nick says (on Scales of Poi, I dunno about online) that there's 64 different possible combos of arm and poi direction and timeing possible, I take his word for it.

Definitely check out playpoi.com for some specific examples.

Yeah, that's right, but if you count turning with them, I believe that would multiply that to, according to my head math, 128.

But those numbers don't count amounts of petals, and I don't think that turns should be counted because it doesn't affect the pattern.

Damn me and my rantings but yes 64 is right, 8x8 find the 8 out for yourself because i don't feel like listing

Sounds like fun. Will play.

The 64 (well, 8) comes from direction and timing senses:
same-time or split-time
same direction or opposites (butterfly)

Incidentally, if you wanted to add turning, it would be 256, since you can turn in two directions.

1024 for the athletic??? (somersault, both ways).

Lol, How do you do that with butterfly arm motions? I can do something like that with, umm, I think it would be considered extensions. But I combine it with stalls so it doesn't get a full extension between stalls.

Btw, I think what I do is called a Monkeyjump. Haven't gotten good at all at it yet because a lack of outside practice (damn you cold weather) but I can still barely do it.

thank you very much i have had a hard time finding new moves but this is very helpfull

will somebody please please please explain to me what a monkey jump is?
ive heard it a few times and i have no idea what it is :$

Yes, that is what I do, and I can't really explain, but I've taken it to learn, and I think I have now, most in this video. Monkey jump is near the end and I looked and I cannot do the antispin flower thing, all of the splittime butterfly stalls, or throws.I cando most of those hybrids though, other things I learned in the past month

Right now I'm moving away from trying to learn trick after trick (not that I was learning piles of new tricks!) and now am trying to just move around with the poi swinging and figure out my own flow. Problem is I've never ever been good at dancing and frankly I'm pretty rigid in my movements. It's a nice day out so I'll give it some time outside to play around with that. Fortunately Nick's vids seem to have an emphasis on that for the beginners. Between that and more plane control, I've got enough to keep me occupied for a while. I might need to hit up some graceful friends or get in touch with some of the local belly dancer groups to get some good advice on properly shaking my @$$!

I am actually doing a similar thing, I am going to be trading Geometry tutoring for dance lessons from one of the best dancers in Michigan, she does the Nutcracker at the FOX Theater in Detroit every year and this was her last time this year

But yeah, I've been mostly doing tech all winter because I've been trapped inside and still am. I can't say it hasn't freed me up a ton though, I think I'll have an advantage of first practicing my flow with all the fun moves/transitions I've been working on

I strongly suggest after you fix your planes as that is the most important for flow, and work on under the legs when you can.

Working on remembering to actually warm up and stretch before I practice. My poor old lady shoulders!

Edit: And to spin for shorter sessions when recovering. Fifteen minutes always turns into an hour and a half...