Wet and wild with a sunny side

Saturday saw the Annual Hanami Festival {Cherry Blossom Festival} at Brogdale Fruit Collections. Kent Kite Flyers where asked to display and fly Japanese related kites the start of the day was less than promising with heavy rain from 10:30 till midday then.......so with no further words here are some shots of both the blossom and kites.

Something new for 2015 finished at last

Ok I got so far then stalled the reason being....

"Back Cutting"

...any one who has built a kite with a coloured image on a coloured background will know the two colours tend to muddy each other, the only way around this is to "back cut" the single most terrifying part of building a kite!!!

One slip and your beautiful sail is damaged!!!!

Before back cutting

The start of the process and tools

Part way through

So having cut away unwanted orange fabric on twenty for areas of the sail we have this.....  

you see why it needs back-cutting

So now all I have to do is spar and bridle it!

There are four spars one across the head of the kite one down the spine and two diagonals. The spine as a tensioning pocket at the bottom made using rip-stop and Velcro

The top is held against the head spar with a knock end

The bottom of the diagonals fit into pockets in the corners and the tops using knock-ends grip some cord sewn into the top corners.

Then the top of the kite is tensioned with the shock-cord and the top spar is bowed with a line between the knock-ends on the head spar

I had problems working out how the bridle should be made as there are at least two methods out there on the net. Finally I used a compound bridle using the bridling points shown in David Pelham's book Kites. This has bridling points at each end of the head spar and two points on the spine one at the crossing of the diagonals and one almost half way from this to the bottom of the spar, these are linked by another bridle line using Prusik Knots then a tow point is added.

Now all we have to do is see if it flys???

    

Road Trip

So today I went out with a friend to get some photos to accompany some of her writing. I cant share any that are likely to support her work but here are few that I took for my own interest.
We stopped at Lower Halstow

In dock my favourite sailing barge Edith May

She is registered in Harwich and I belive the symbol on her stern points toward the cargo she was built to carry.......

...............Grain and straw

The cover over her tiller mechanism 

Behind Edith May was moored an Ouster Smack called Thistle 

  

As you see she is registered in Faversham

I loved the rings on the mast

Also in Lower Halstow we found this log that has refused to die

Something new for 2015 continued

Having edged the sail I had to sew on the top spar pocket 

The tabs at the left and right are to take some shock cord to tension the top of the sail along the spar, then I sewed the pockets for the bottom of the  diagonal spars      

   Now the fun bit trying to sew the Logo onto the  sail!!

First you pin the rough cut to the sail

I ran out of pins so had to do part of it then re-pin!
I did cut some of the waste away before I re-pinned so I got some idea what the finish would be like.

The surplice material is cut away using a stich ripper the theory is that usinthis you don't cut through the main sail.

Almost there!!

 

And the finished sail

Some thing New for 2015

Kent Kite Flyers have been invited to exhibit at the Brogdale Fruit Farms Hanami festival. Hanami is the Japanese festival of Cherry Blossom, so we intend to display some Japanese and Japanese inspired kites. So I decided to build a Suruga, a kite that normally has a picture of a Japanese warrior on it, but I have permission to use the Logo from Lion Drums who made my Cajon and thought this would fit well.

First stage cut out a template  www.kiteplans.org/ is a great resource and I borrowed the diagrams bellow to help me

 

 

So using these guides I cut a paper template and with a data projecter enlarged the logo I have onto the paper

 

 

I cut the main sail from  some yellow rip-stop fabric I have and using tailors chalk marked some guides to show where the logo should sit

Then again with the tailor's chalk I marked up the lion on some blue fabric and cut roughly round the image and laid it on the sail to get an idea of the fit

 

Next I had to reinforce the seven corners to prevent them tearing under tension and edge the whole sail leaving me with this

 

More to follow