I've been looking at the new X curriculum with a mixture of wonder, fear and dread :p But since actually giving it a go i've found it's not actually that impossible. I'm not saying that it's not difficult, I mean the reversed angles are all kinds of strange to me and the combinations of movements are definitely different from what I've been used to.
If you give it a go though, you'll improve in pretty much the same way you did with the FSC curriculum. It just takes time and practice.
Something that I thought might help however, was diagrams of the cuts for X1, X2 and X3. I've knocked them up in simple graphics with the first and second bottles to cut numbered and the angle and direction of the cuts illustrated as clearly as I could. To avoid ambiguity I will point out that they are all drawn as if they are actually the targets in front of you.
Finally, as a note to the group: If you see anything that I've messed up in the diagrams, just let me know and I'll fix it ;)
Yes, This is my entry for the first part of the X-Tameshigiri curriculum. I've made all the cutting patterns required and as usual I've endeavoured to make them happen multiple times in order to show that I'm not just fluking the cuts.
This was not my best cutting session to be fair and I found these cuts quite difficult due to the extreme changes in the mix of angles. The original bottle curriculum tended to use the same plane on the cuts regardless of whether or not they were returning or normal double cuts, whereas these ones require the sword to be whipped around the target as it drops and realigned on an almost opposite angle. Tricky tricky tricky.
but doable..
I have recently been asked to join another group called X-Tameshigiri. It's similar to the Freestyle Cutters and has members from that group but it's a lot more active. unfortunately, FSC seems to have taken a nose dive. I believe that this was because its leadership was centralised and because those people then ducked out of the group to pursue other things in their life, that left a big black hole in the centre of the groups organisation. For whatever reasons, I'm still a member of the FSC but I've completed the curriculum cuts there and now there's nothing more to do. X-Tameshigiri is a different group with a different angle on things and much more challenging cuts. I don't know if I'm going to be able to make these grades or not, but it should be fun to try.
