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Greetings from Hawaii

I’m married now, woot! Angeline and I were wed in a quick ceremony in Rockville with 80 of our closest friends and family. I’m so lucky! I feel so grown up.

We’ve spent the last week on Oahu, and today we’re hopping on a plane to go visit Kauai for a week. Also, this marks the last day of free hotel internet, so I guess I might as well blog a note or two.

Our hotel is situated right on Waikiki Beach. I would definitely stay at this spot again – it’s extremely convenient to plenty of dining options and, while not the largest beach on the island, Waikiki Beach has plenty of charm. At this time of year it’s not too terribly crowded.

While here we climbed Diamond Head (a former volcano crater with excellent views of Waikiki), visited the Polynesian Culture Center for a luau, circumnavigated the island, visited a pineapple plantation, went swimming near the Banzai Pipeline (non-existent at this time of year), ate some incredible meals, and just generally relaxed. One of the coolest things was snorkeling in Hanauma Bay, where we saw a large sea turtle eating algae off of a rock. We were close enough that we could reach out and touch him, if that weren’t frowned upon by the park service.

It’s actually a bit too windy here to fly the kites, especially since I left my 150 lb line at home. I may try to fly my eddy this week on Kauai even so.

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Pokemon Rokkaku

Anyone who has been looking at my flickr feed has seen that I’ve had another kite in the works for the last couple of months. I’ve had this particular one in mind for a while but didn’t quite have the sewing skills to pull it off until now. So, I present, the Snorlax rokkaku:
Part of a foot
Assembled drawing
Partial appliqué
Snorlax Applique
Ange and Kite
Snorlax in flight

To build this, first, I stole a graphic off of Wikipedia and re-drew it in Inkscape, so that I’d have a vector version to work with. I saved an EPS version of the image then used the poster program in Linux to print it out, scaled way up, on regular letter size paper with cut and paste margins. After assembling all of the individual pieces of paper together into one huge image, I placed it on my glass coffee table, put black ripstop nylon on top, and a lamp under the table, so that I could then trace it with a white fabric pencil.

Next, I layered several large sheets of ripstop nylon: white on bottom, turquoise, gray, and the black which had the tracing of the design on top. I sewed zigzags along all of the lines, then cut out layers of ripstop from the front and back until the appropriate color was left. Finally, I added triangular panels of RSN for the top and bottom of the kite, hemmed the whole thing, and added spar pockets and reinforcements. I sparred it with carbon rods – SkyShark P400 center spar and a pair of P200s or P300s for the spreaders (I have both for varying wind conditions).

Now the rationale: I wanted to finish this one in time for our honeymoon, as Snorlax is something of a mascot for Angeline. At least, that’s what she got when she did the ‘which Pokemon are you?’ quiz (Keirsey has nothing on the internets). We don’t really know anything about the Snorlaxi but it seemed like the perfect cartoon to put on this rok, and now Angeline has her own kite to fly when I’m putting up my della porta in Hawaii!