#ThursdayIsKiteDay

Add a kite to your car, for when the wind moves you.

2 weeks ago I went to the Washington State International Kite Festival. It is getting smaller, but is still great.

I was sorting and moving pictures today.

This is a great portrait of a kite flier w/ kite. She is not known to me, but was a member of a small family that volunteered to fly a rokaku in the team rok battle that Rhonda Brewer coordinates. That kite is made of Tyvek for durability and decorated with markers.

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#ThursdayIsKiteDay

Buy a kite, put it in your car, and fly it when the wind moves you.

Here is the best personal story coming out of last week's kite festival I attended, WSIKF 2025.

I am proud to own my sun burst flowform, an oversized kite I bought 3 years ago, a kite large enough to be flown on the dedicated oversized kite field, which is a way to join the rest of my chosen community in celebrating the kite festival.

Monday was its first flight since I bought it. Everything went...

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#ThursdayIsKiteDay
+ #Aerodynamics
+ #Ballistics
+ #RocketScience

Yeah... this is going to be fun.

So, here's the deal. Next week I am going to show you a kite that is inherently unstable and talk about the 70 year journey that eventually made it better. But in order to make that episode shorter and more manageable, we are going to cover the aerodynamics of directional stability now. So you are going to learn 2 new vocabulary words and the second they are defined everything is going...

#ThursdayIsKiteDay
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I mentioned Ray Bethel in passing a few weeks ago, but as I was going through some kite pictures I found a few more, so this week's column is a memorial to Ray who passed away in 2018 at 90 years old.

Ray was a special kite flier. I didn't know him personally, but he was at many kite festival I went to around 2010 and later, at which point he was already in his 80s. He took up kite flying in his 50s, without any previous experience or interest and by the 1990s he was...

#ThursdayIsKiteDay
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Today we are going to cover Rokkaku kites, a traditional Japanese fighter kite, that when adopted by western kite makers, makes a fine platform for artists. All of today's pictures are from the 2012 Washington State International Kite Festival, apparently a time when we had both a very sunny Saturday and I had a decent camera.

A Rokkaku is a six sided kite. It is traditionally slightly taller that it is wide, although some variation exist. It has a vertical spine and...

#ThursdayIsKiteDay
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About two weeks ago I was over a friend's house. He has 2 young daughters and while on a trip with the girls he bought them a kite which they tried out in a grassy field at a relative's house, and while it didn't fly hardly at all the girls were still fairly interested in it. They had misplaced the cross spar on the trip back, but he eventually found it and I asked to have a look at it.

It was fairly typical for a kid's kite. It is small & the fabric is a bit heavy for...

#ThursdayIsKiteDay
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Discussion of survey results from last week, on why people don't fly kites. Unrelated pictures from Longbeach Kite festival of 2 weeks ago.

Reasons people don't fly kites now, Survey Analysis (in order of most common reason):

#1, 44%, I have other hobbies, that looks more boring.

Fair enough. I have other hobbies too, about a 1/2 dozen, maybe 3 I try to enjoy daily. Kite flying isn't like playing video games on my phone, or gardening, or cooking, you can't do it daily..

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#ThursdayIsKiteDay (kite pictures on page 2)

Survey! Why do you not own or are not interested in flying kites? Check all that apply. Add your unlisted reasons or story in the comments and boost for visibility, please. Discussion next week.