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:
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!
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