Category: kites

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…

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.

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.

For those that don’t know, Saturday marks the beginning of the Cherry Blossom festival, and consequently the annual Smithsonian Kite festival — always a blast. Last year I wanted to make a kite for the event, but never got around to it. So, last Sunday I opened up that roll of nylon sitting in the corner and got to work.

Last night, I bought a cheap sewing machine for the appliqué work necessary for the design (the obvious fractal). Clearly, home ec in middle school was worthless. I had to take apart the machine twice to remove big gobs of thread stuck therein, until I learned how the bobbin is supposed to be threaded. Then, tonight I went to work on the kite after some practice and proceeded to sew some really hideous seams.

So, I’ve decided this will be my “one to throw away,” though I still hope to have it in the sky this weekend. First I have to fix the hole I punched in the sail.

I made some more progress on the kite camera rig over the weekend. I attached the battery pack to the back and the RF receiver to the L-bracket using those foam mounting squares that are so good at tearing up walls. Then I velcro-ed the servo just above the shutter button so that pushing on the stick will cause it to snap a picture. I had to wrap a rubber band around the servo and camera body; otherwise the servo would simply lift up instead of applying force to the shutter. Finally, I finished up the lingering bits of the Pivacet suspension. So everything is ready to go for the next sunny weekend!

I made a bit more progress with the kite cradle. I picked up a 1/4″ dowel and some vinyl tubing from Home Depot, and scavenged various other bits of wood from the ex-kitchen cabinets. Pictured is more or less what the thing should look like once hitched to the kite, although I still haven’t decided how to mount the servos and R/C receiver — duct tape is a leading candidate. This design, incidentally, is straight from the pages of Make: magazine, except that I pretty much ignored the directions and got all the wrong sizes for everything, and also that mine will be R/C controlled instead of timed with silly putty.

I’ve made some slight progress on my aerial photography project. I bought a used R/C airplane radio with servos and a receiver. The receiver and servos were meant for park flyers (i.e. super light planes) so I figure that will be a good match for the kite where it’s all about weight. But you gotta power those things somehow, so I built a simple battery supply using a Radio Shack AA battery holder and shorting one of the terminals. The batteries add a lot of weight, but I can probably throw a resistor in series with the PS and power the camera off of the batteries as well. The idea is to mount the servo on top of the camera near the shutter button, then just wiggle the stick to snap a picture. I’ve tested this in a limited fashion and it seems to work nicely. The camera, of course, is the “one-time-use” CVS camera which has been hacked to be many-time-use.

Saturday was perfect weather for the 40th Annual Smithonian Kite Festival. AC and I relived our youth on the Washington Monument grounds, getting my pair of kites up into the air with various levels of success. AC proved superior at piloting, managing to get the hard-to-fly spinning diamond to the end of its tether, 150 feet up, and the froggy kite to somewhere in the 200 ft. range. Unlike our Pakistani counterparts, for whom kites are apparently illegal, we tangled lines with other freedom-loving fliers sporting dragonflies, airplanes, fish, monkeys, boxes, rings, and multifarious other shapes. Much fun was had.

After lunch, we strolled over to the Sackler museum where they are currently hosting a Hokusai exhibit. You might recognize the “Great Wave” (left) from the cover of half a dozen computer science books. If you do, then you are a nerd. Just saying. Yeah, I am.

Mason in the Final Four? Are you kidding me? The ACC sucks.

Thanks to all who showed up this weekend and left beer at my house. My 31st year shall begin with much drinking.

Now it’s time to look forward to the next big event… after St. Patrick’s Day… and that is of course the annual Smithsonian Kite Festival. I went last year as a spectator and watched hundreds of people try to get little squares of fabric way up in the sky. This year, I plan to have a square of my own. I have a couple of prefab kites ready to go, and I also have some plain nylon in transit to my house, where, should enough time and creativity strike, I shall try to construct a third. So, on the 25th of March, why not join me with your own sail on the Mall. Or if you aren’t into the whole kite scene, there’s always the enjoyable prospect of freezing in the blustery wind while taking pictures of cherry blossoms.

For myself, this may be the springboard into a new hobby. I still need to do something with my hacked CVS camera, and rigging up a pivacet suspension and a remote shutter trigger to take pictures from the kite’s point of view sure seems like it could waste some time.

More info on the kite festival.

I leave for the Mall this morning, because I am bored, and because yesterday I spent nearly the entire day on the couch avoiding the rain and buying lots of things on the internet. So they are having this kite festival today, as part of the NCBF. I intend to take pictures, but my camera’s battery is dead. I stop first at a roped-off field where two guys are facing off in a trick flying competition. One guy makes his kite walk on the ground – neat! (I could probably do that too, but not on purpose.)

It is a blustery day as it always is when the cherry trees are in bloom, so I plan to walk around a bit, then head inside, maybe watch an IMAX film or something like that. Halfway to the Capitol, I’m watching someone dump their frog-shaped kite into a tree, when I nearly bump into Steven of the alumni club. This is a lucky coincidence, apparently half the young alumni are also here, flying kites with varying levels of success, or watching the others’ triumphs and failures. So instead of going inside I stick it out a bit longer and join the watchers. A bit of the old vicarious thrill takes over as we watch young kids and grown-up kids struggle with kites of all shapes: colored diamonds, boxes, squares, cylinders, an airborne menagerie of dragons, turtles, pteradactyls, insects, a fleet of airplanes, rockets, and even a pirate ship. Wes’ simple black and neon diamond tangles with the nearby box kite and the mighty Superman…at least seven or eight times. Knots ensue.

Soon the wind gets the best of everyone so we head to the cafeteria of the new Native American museum. The food is good but it isn’t cheap. I believe the cashier’s small talk is an unspoken apology for the pricing. She is no doubt accustomed to sudden frowns of tired visitors when the total is announced and wallets are emptied. So we eat our authentic Native American foods and drink our not so authentic Coca Colas, then lunch is over and we part. I return home to reoccupy my couch.

Well, at least I did something this weekend.