Building Ingenious Messes From Hulking Windmills

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It is my quixotic desire to discover the perfect windmill so let’s attack this task at full tilt. The two patterns below are the building blocks for the eight base mills mess variations. Each mess links together a part of one of these two windmills mirrored on either side of the pattern. In fact you could call a mills mess a mess o’ ‘mills.

NB The animations aren’t perfect and sometimes it’s hard to see if the throw is above or below the arm, but the juggler moves his hand lower to make an under the arm throw so if you look closely you can tell. Generally speaking in real life you compress the pattern so all the throws are roughly the same height. The symbols are listed here and the notation is explained on the main page.

If you juggle a windmill that’s a mixture of the two patterns above you get an alternating windmill (see pattern below left – all the throws should be the same height). We can take this pattern and turn into a mess just by adding a connecting throw and mirroring the pattern on the other side (see pattern below right). I call it a Flip Flop Flos Mess mostly just because it sound good. You could do it as a mills mess as opposed to a flos mess, however a mills mess has three crossing throws so the windmill would be unbalanced. I prefer a flos mess with a nice balanced two crossing throws on each side. If you really wanted it to be a mills your could do it as a 7:7 mills which has  four crossing throws.

Okay let’s make things a bit more interesting. We can do a slightly higher under arm throw that we catch with the same hand we threw it with, and then the hand which now isn’t throwing can do a little loop. That gives us this fun little windmill variation (see below left). These patterns are easier to learn if you understand the siteswap (the numbers at the start of each pattern) but it’s not essential. Again we can turn it into a mess by adding a connecting throw and mirroring it on the other side.

[There’s a more continuous version of this where you juggle two balls in one hand and do the loop around every throw with the other hand (siteswap: 42) but it’s not really a windmill so we won’t focus on it here.]

NB You could just do a 234 flos mess and get a similar looping effect but this version feels more windmill-y and I like the look of the extra 3s. I often think that the three digit siteswaps lose a lot of the mills mess magic, but if you add a couple of 3s you get the complexity of the siteswap with the magic of the mills.

Taking the same under arm throw windmill we could use the same “throw the object higher and catch it with the hand that threw it” idea but apply it to the uncrossed throw. Now we can do a little pop over the arm with our under the arm throw. This is a bit harder that the last pattern and you want to keep the little throw over the arm as low and tight as possible (see below left). NB There’s now a T after the 2 in the siteswap and that’s just to show that we’re throwing it, because 2s are generally just held. On the right we have the mills mess version.

Let’s get even more ambitious and make our throw a little higher. It’s caught by the other hand and now we have time for two loops which we can do around each other. The pattern on the left is the windmill version and then the pattern on the right is what happens if we connect the two sides together as above. This gives a Flos version of a pattern more commonly done as a standard mills mess with the 5 as the under the arm throw. If you add a clawed throw and catch it’s called a Rubenstein’s Revenge.

If we did these loops under every throw we’d get this pattern which is one of my favorites. When you do it with objects like clubs or hoops you can sweep the loops down by your sides which looks fantastic. This animation just gives you an idea of it:

We can also add a little shower into the windmill. Below is the under throw windmill with the shower on the left then the mess pattern on the right. This is not the most common way of doing a shower in a mess pattern. If you look closely you’ll see the 1 which is the quick zip from one hand to the other isn’t going in the direction it would normally go in a shower. In a normal shower the high throws go one way and the low throws go the other in a circle. But because we are trying to keep our windmill as pure as possible we’re going to go against the flow but with the Flo. So the “1” goes outside to inside just like the other throws.

If you don’t understand why some letters are in brackets it’s to show that they’re going straight to the other hand because they’re a “1”. You can find out more about this in the siteswap section.

We can take the same idea and apply it to the under catch Windmill. Then when we turn this into a mess it gives us the flipped version of the last pattern. We could take both these windmills and alternate between them in a hulking windmill. Finally if we are finally truly enthused we could turn that into a hulking mess giving us an 18bt pattern. I’ve not bothered to animate these last few patterns because the first two look very similar to the two above, and the second two the animation just doesn’t capture them very well. But they are quite fun to juggle and the 18bt one takes a fair amount of concentration!

4413 O/ Ur R U(u)r Ru – Under Catch Windmill with Shower
44133 o/ Ul L U(u)l Lu Uu : Ur R U(u)r Ru Uu – 44133 Flipped Flos Mess
4413 O/ Ur R U(u)l Lu Ul L U(u)r Ru – Alternating Windmill with Showers
441344133 o/Ur R U(u)l Lu Ul L U(u)r Ru Uu : Ul L U(u)r Ru Ur R U(u)l Lu Uu – Alternating Windmill with Showers Mess

That concludes this section on windmills. Hopefully fixating on windmills hasn’t sent you loopy. I’m not obsessed with them at all and if I wanted I could totally stop juggling them at any time.

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– Appendix A: List of Patterns
– Appendix C: Random Pretzel Hand Theory