AC and I went down to the Washington Monument grounds to try out the kite today, on a lovely sunny, breezy day. It took a few adjustments of the bridle to get the thing aloft, and the tail kept getting tangled up, but once I had it figured out it took up all of my line and was still pulling pretty hard. Quite a nice sense of accomplishment to see what began as a couple of rolls of nylon actually fly and not look half bad.
Fancy Stripes Cont.
I’ve made more progress on the Della Porta. The sail is now complete, after sewing each of the 16 panels to its neighbors, first with a 1/4″ straight seam on the back and then with a zig-zag stitch over the good side. I only had to use the seam ripper… oh, let’s call it less than a hundred times. On to step 3…
Fancy stripes
I started work on another kite this week. This time I’m following a plan, one of the howtos over on kitebuilder.com. Hopefully, my much improved sewing skills coupled with some RTFM-ing will lead to more success in this venture. The pattern is from a quilting block called ‘Fancy Stripes’ and should be about 3′ by 4′ when completed.
Grilled
I officially opened the 10 month grill season last weekend. The only thing worse than doing the propane exchange rigamarole at Home Depot: doing the exchange at Home Depot, getting handed an empty tank, looking at the guy funny but assuming he knows what he’s doing (after all that’s his job), going home to verify that yes, the new tank is empty, and going back to try to find someone who cares so you can finally take the new tank home and cook with it because it’s now 4pm and you haven’t had lunch yet.
One nice thing about amateur home cooking is that you can create that which you cannot find in a restaurant. In my case: I made fajitas with one of the several filet mignons in my freezer. You may say that is silly to use such an expensive cut of meat in place of a $3 flank steak in a cooking application where toughness really doesn’t matter, and you may be right, but that doesn’t change the fact that the “file-tas” were damn good. Now I just need to figure out how to work bacon into that equation…
In flight
AC and I showed up on the mall to throngs of kite fanatics, their sails dotting the sky very much like a plague of locusts. In the stiff breeze, my kite lept to the sky…then went unstable, hit two people, and the kiteline yanked the grommet off. Still, it flew, and it wasn’t too bad for a first try given I learned a ton from the first stitch on. We spent the rest of the morning flying my two store-bought kites (toddlers love the spinner on my diamond kite), but already I’m contemplating my next hand-made.