Kites in chronological order after design year, from 1994 and onwards. 

The kites are grouped in sections of eight.

On smartphone: use finger for scrolling sideways to be able to see all pictures.

–

Details of kites # 25 – 32.

Click  the picture to get a larger picture.

Click the button under the picture to get more information.

Kite NamePicturePicture
Picture
25. Square Foot


Single point Square 		Square Foot


Square Swede
26. BAHCO 10


BAHCO 10
27. Don't Waste Your Time


Don't Waste Time 		Don't Waste Your Time


不要浪费 - Bùyào làngfèi 		Don't Waste Your Time


La tudie - لا تضيع 		Don't Waste Your Time


Jangan buang
28. Money Laundry


Money Laundry 		Money


The Money 		Inflation


Inflation 		EyeD


Eye D
29. Imposters - Ingvar


Brand new kite 1 		Imposters - Just did it


Brand new kite 2 		Aerosmith


Aerosmith
30. Block Shot


Block Shot 		Block Shot


Block Shot
The hint
31. YangTze


Canterbury 30 m 		YangTze


Canterbury 15 m 		YangTze Tricolor in Dieppe


YangTze 		YangTze videos
32. Butterfly


Butterfly 		Liv


Liv 		Anchor


Anchor 		Emborg


Emborg

The rest of the kites.

Click  the button in left column the get the details of the kites in the section.

1. A-Kross


2. Fold Black


3. Who's flying whom?


4. Volvolare
View details of kites 1 - 85. Go fly a Kite, Charlie Brown!


6. Sverker Longship






7. Ruler of the Sky


8. SHARK
9. Salida Sled

10. Fly50

11. Flag

12. Sueño de Barrilete
View details of kites #9 - 1613. ReTurn

14. Confusion (Fat Flat Rok)

15. Red Tail

16. Sake Dako
17. Absolut Kite

18. Nokap

19. Flyn

20. WannaBees
View details of kites #17 - 2421. PentArch

22. Stockholm 1912

23. Coded & Decoded

24. Ikan & Sakana
25. Square Foot

26 BAHCO 10

27. Don't Waste Your Time

28. Money Laundry
View details of kites #25 - 3229. Imposters

30. Block Shot

31. YangTze

32. Butterfly
41. Ririn

42. ThorNado
View details of kites #41 - 48

Emborg is a second butterfly from Denmark. It is meta-butterfly in that there are two butterflies depicted on it!

New Zealand Anchor, 10g

The Anchor butter from New Zealand comes in many variations: Salted 7 g, Salted 10 g, Salted Chinese and even Unsalted.

Australian Liv, 10 g

Second out was the slightly heavier Australian Liv.

First Butterfly out is the slightly salted Danish Lurpak, 7g

The Butterfly is a kite which I am a bit surprised that no-one has made before. It is an obvious pun! The small butter containers you get on aeroplanes and restaurants: just make the lid fly and there is a Butterfly!

                                     Note that there is a genuine butter-fly in the picture 

I had had the idea for many years, but it it wasn’t until a trip to China where I found the quality bamboo in the correct dimension that I could start making it.

This is what I posted on Facebook in January 2016:

Sometimes I get the feeling that I actually have aquired some understanding and know how to apply it. Today was such a time.

I need a frame for a new project: a rectangular kite, portrait orientation with rounded corners. Single point bridle and preferably a little bit flexible wings.

So starting off from my A-kross frame and with inspiration from Li RuoXin’s small kites I bent some bamboo last night and put it on a trash skin.

I thought the wind of today would not be strong enough (1 – 2 m/s), but lo and behold: the kite took off into the air and flew *steady* on the towing point I had chosen!

YangTze Tricolor, 30m,  in Dieppe 2016

 

 

Yellow 30 Yangtze

 

Now, the name Canterbury seemed to be too a far fetched pun (you had to remember from your classes on English medieval literature and Chaucer who wrote The Canterbury Tales), so I changed the name to YangTze, which both is a hommage to the origin (Janggan) and a reference to the Chinese river for the riverlike flow of the tail.

I also changed from 3 + 3 point bridle to 2 point bridle which made the kite self balancing.

Since every kite implied a lot of boring sewing I made an agreement with Kaixuan Kite in Weifang to sew them up for me.

Then I could test to stack the 15 m kites, and the stack works wonderfully: It has a wind range of 4 – 11 m/s! At 11 m/s a stack of four has a tremendous pull, but up to 7 – 8 m/s it is quite easy to handle.

I experimented a while with the tail before I got the rippling effect that I was seeking.

Unfortunately I lost this kite in the sea at a kite festival in Malaysia two months later, without having noted down any measurements.

I had started, though, making a 15 m long kite, but that would’t lift. Not until I realized it needed more wind than the 30 m long one: minimum 4 m/s.

 

Bali has the strongest kite culture in the world with several unique kites, one of them is the Janggan which has a tail that usually is 20 times the wingspan. Kites with wingspans of 3 – 5 m are considered medium size; an 8 m Janggan is large and has thus a 160 m long tail. The biggest Janggan till now is the Nagaraja, which has a wingspan of 11.5 m and has a 234 m long tail. However, it is not only the length of the tail that is remarkable: it is also the rippling movement of the tail, like waves flowing from the wings down to the end of the tail.

A few years ago we, a visiting Australian kite friend and me, talked about how to use that kind of tail in a western style kite.

That idea challenged me: I wanted to make a kite where the lifting part is as invisible as possible (in contrast to the Janggan where the lifting part is very elaborated, especially the head that is richly decorated).

It took me half a year before the solution dawned on me: A simple vented wing where the sail continues directly as the tail. The Eye Phi (Eye Φ) frame was born.

I happened to have some fibre glass rods (that I bought in England 1996, and that have since then been waiting to be used) and enough of red and white ripstop to sew up a kite 1.5 m wide and with 30 m long tail. For the first trials there was not enough wind, but as soon the windspeed was higher than 3 m/s the kite lifted and flew well!

I gave the kite the name Canterbury.

Here is the hint: Sachin Tendulkar doing a Block Shot at a cricket game, protecting the wicket:

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

There is a wonderful kite festival at the Marina Barrage in Singapore. The winds are often turbulent, but the view is fantastic. This day the wind was pretty steady in an Eastern direction and I had two kites up and the Block Shot kite ready waiting on the ground. Late in the afternoon the wind shifted 100°, now coming from South East. A perfect direction, but before I had got my two kites down and got the Block Shot up the wind started to fade. A kite friend managed to take a few photos in back light though. The pictures are not perfect, so I’ll have to wait for the next opportunity.

                                  Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Some places can give an inspiration to a new kite. One is the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore as seen from the Marina Barrage. Probably only people from the Commonwealth can understand this kite without hints.

The project name for the kite was Singapore Wicket.

 

 

 

Reference: Pink

The link will open in a new tab.

The challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

An alternative sub text here would be: Just fly it.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

The challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

An alternative sub text here would be: Just fly it.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

The challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

An alternative sub text here would be: Just fly it.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

Reference: Pink

The link will open in a new tab.

The challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

An alternative sub text here would be: Just fly it.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

Reference: Pink

The link will open in a new tab.

The challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

An alternative sub text here would be: Just fly it.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

Some places can give an inspiration to a new kite. One is the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore as seen from the Marina Barrage. Probably only people from the Commonwealth can understand this kite without hints.

The project name for the kite was Singapore Wicket.

 

 

 

Reference: Pink

The link will open in a new tab.

The challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

An alternative sub text here would be: Just fly it.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Some places can give an inspiration to a new kite. One is the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore as seen from the Marina Barrage. Probably only people from the Commonwealth can understand this kite without hints.

The project name for the kite was Singapore Wicket.

 

 

 

Reference: Pink

The link will open in a new tab.

The challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

An alternative sub text here would be: Just fly it.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

There is a wonderful kite festival at the Marina Barrage in Singapore. The winds are often turbulent, but the view is fantastic. This day the wind was pretty steady in an Eastern direction and I had two kites up and the Block Shot kite ready waiting on the ground. Late in the afternoon the wind shifted 100°, now coming from South East. A perfect direction, but before I had got my two kites down and got the Block Shot up the wind started to fade. A kite friend managed to take a few photos in back light though. The pictures are not perfect, so I’ll have to wait for the next opportunity.

                                  Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Some places can give an inspiration to a new kite. One is the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore as seen from the Marina Barrage. Probably only people from the Commonwealth can understand this kite without hints.

The project name for the kite was Singapore Wicket.

 

 

 

Reference: Pink

The link will open in a new tab.

The challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

An alternative sub text here would be: Just fly it.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

There is a wonderful kite festival at the Marina Barrage in Singapore. The winds are often turbulent, but the view is fantastic. This day the wind was pretty steady in an Eastern direction and I had two kites up and the Block Shot kite ready waiting on the ground. Late in the afternoon the wind shifted 100°, now coming from South East. A perfect direction, but before I had got my two kites down and got the Block Shot up the wind started to fade. A kite friend managed to take a few photos in back light though. The pictures are not perfect, so I’ll have to wait for the next opportunity.

                                  Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Some places can give an inspiration to a new kite. One is the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore as seen from the Marina Barrage. Probably only people from the Commonwealth can understand this kite without hints.

The project name for the kite was Singapore Wicket.

 

 

 

Reference: Pink

The link will open in a new tab.

The challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

An alternative sub text here would be: Just fly it.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

Here is the hint: Sachin Tendulkar doing a Block Shot at a cricket game, protecting the wicket:

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

There is a wonderful kite festival at the Marina Barrage in Singapore. The winds are often turbulent, but the view is fantastic. This day the wind was pretty steady in an Eastern direction and I had two kites up and the Block Shot kite ready waiting on the ground. Late in the afternoon the wind shifted 100°, now coming from South East. A perfect direction, but before I had got my two kites down and got the Block Shot up the wind started to fade. A kite friend managed to take a few photos in back light though. The pictures are not perfect, so I’ll have to wait for the next opportunity.

                                  Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Some places can give an inspiration to a new kite. One is the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore as seen from the Marina Barrage. Probably only people from the Commonwealth can understand this kite without hints.

The project name for the kite was Singapore Wicket.

 

 

 

Reference: Pink

The link will open in a new tab.

The challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

An alternative sub text here would be: Just fly it.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

Bali has the strongest kite culture in the world with several unique kites, one of them is the Janggan which has a tail that usually is 20 times the wingspan. Kites with wingspans of 3 – 5 m are considered medium size; an 8 m Janggan is large and has thus a 160 m long tail. The biggest Janggan till now is the Nagaraja, which has a wingspan of 11.5 m and has a 234 m long tail. However, it is not only the length of the tail that is remarkable: it is also the rippling movement of the tail, like waves flowing from the wings down to the end of the tail.

A few years ago we, a visiting Australian kite friend and me, talked about how to use that kind of tail in a western style kite.

That idea challenged me: I wanted to make a kite where the lifting part is as invisible as possible (in contrast to the Janggan where the lifting part is very elaborated, especially the head that is richly decorated).

It took me half a year before the solution dawned on me: A simple vented wing where the sail continues directly as the tail. The Eye Phi (Eye Φ) frame was born.

I happened to have some fibre glass rods (that I bought in England 1996, and that have since then been waiting to be used) and enough of red and white ripstop to sew up a kite 1.5 m wide and with 30 m long tail. For the first trials there was not enough wind, but as soon the windspeed was higher than 3 m/s the kite lifted and flew well!

I gave the kite the name Canterbury.

Here is the hint: Sachin Tendulkar doing a Block Shot at a cricket game, protecting the wicket:

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

There is a wonderful kite festival at the Marina Barrage in Singapore. The winds are often turbulent, but the view is fantastic. This day the wind was pretty steady in an Eastern direction and I had two kites up and the Block Shot kite ready waiting on the ground. Late in the afternoon the wind shifted 100°, now coming from South East. A perfect direction, but before I had got my two kites down and got the Block Shot up the wind started to fade. A kite friend managed to take a few photos in back light though. The pictures are not perfect, so I’ll have to wait for the next opportunity.

                                  Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Some places can give an inspiration to a new kite. One is the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore as seen from the Marina Barrage. Probably only people from the Commonwealth can understand this kite without hints.

The project name for the kite was Singapore Wicket.

 

 

 

Reference: Pink

The link will open in a new tab.

The challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

An alternative sub text here would be: Just fly it.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

Bali has the strongest kite culture in the world with several unique kites, one of them is the Janggan which has a tail that usually is 20 times the wingspan. Kites with wingspans of 3 – 5 m are considered medium size; an 8 m Janggan is large and has thus a 160 m long tail. The biggest Janggan till now is the Nagaraja, which has a wingspan of 11.5 m and has a 234 m long tail. However, it is not only the length of the tail that is remarkable: it is also the rippling movement of the tail, like waves flowing from the wings down to the end of the tail.

A few years ago we, a visiting Australian kite friend and me, talked about how to use that kind of tail in a western style kite.

That idea challenged me: I wanted to make a kite where the lifting part is as invisible as possible (in contrast to the Janggan where the lifting part is very elaborated, especially the head that is richly decorated).

It took me half a year before the solution dawned on me: A simple vented wing where the sail continues directly as the tail. The Eye Phi (Eye Φ) frame was born.

I happened to have some fibre glass rods (that I bought in England 1996, and that have since then been waiting to be used) and enough of red and white ripstop to sew up a kite 1.5 m wide and with 30 m long tail. For the first trials there was not enough wind, but as soon the windspeed was higher than 3 m/s the kite lifted and flew well!

I gave the kite the name Canterbury.

Here is the hint: Sachin Tendulkar doing a Block Shot at a cricket game, protecting the wicket:

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

There is a wonderful kite festival at the Marina Barrage in Singapore. The winds are often turbulent, but the view is fantastic. This day the wind was pretty steady in an Eastern direction and I had two kites up and the Block Shot kite ready waiting on the ground. Late in the afternoon the wind shifted 100°, now coming from South East. A perfect direction, but before I had got my two kites down and got the Block Shot up the wind started to fade. A kite friend managed to take a few photos in back light though. The pictures are not perfect, so I’ll have to wait for the next opportunity.

                                  Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Some places can give an inspiration to a new kite. One is the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore as seen from the Marina Barrage. Probably only people from the Commonwealth can understand this kite without hints.

The project name for the kite was Singapore Wicket.

 

 

 

Reference: Pink

The link will open in a new tab.

The challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

An alternative sub text here would be: Just fly it.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

I experimented a while with the tail before I got the rippling effect that I was seeking.

Unfortunately I lost this kite in the sea at a kite festival in Malaysia two months later, without having noted down any measurements.

I had started, though, making a 15 m long kite, but that would’t lift. Not until I realized it needed more wind than the 30 m long one: minimum 4 m/s.

 

Bali has the strongest kite culture in the world with several unique kites, one of them is the Janggan which has a tail that usually is 20 times the wingspan. Kites with wingspans of 3 – 5 m are considered medium size; an 8 m Janggan is large and has thus a 160 m long tail. The biggest Janggan till now is the Nagaraja, which has a wingspan of 11.5 m and has a 234 m long tail. However, it is not only the length of the tail that is remarkable: it is also the rippling movement of the tail, like waves flowing from the wings down to the end of the tail.

A few years ago we, a visiting Australian kite friend and me, talked about how to use that kind of tail in a western style kite.

That idea challenged me: I wanted to make a kite where the lifting part is as invisible as possible (in contrast to the Janggan where the lifting part is very elaborated, especially the head that is richly decorated).

It took me half a year before the solution dawned on me: A simple vented wing where the sail continues directly as the tail. The Eye Phi (Eye Φ) frame was born.

I happened to have some fibre glass rods (that I bought in England 1996, and that have since then been waiting to be used) and enough of red and white ripstop to sew up a kite 1.5 m wide and with 30 m long tail. For the first trials there was not enough wind, but as soon the windspeed was higher than 3 m/s the kite lifted and flew well!

I gave the kite the name Canterbury.

Here is the hint: Sachin Tendulkar doing a Block Shot at a cricket game, protecting the wicket:

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

There is a wonderful kite festival at the Marina Barrage in Singapore. The winds are often turbulent, but the view is fantastic. This day the wind was pretty steady in an Eastern direction and I had two kites up and the Block Shot kite ready waiting on the ground. Late in the afternoon the wind shifted 100°, now coming from South East. A perfect direction, but before I had got my two kites down and got the Block Shot up the wind started to fade. A kite friend managed to take a few photos in back light though. The pictures are not perfect, so I’ll have to wait for the next opportunity.

                                  Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Some places can give an inspiration to a new kite. One is the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore as seen from the Marina Barrage. Probably only people from the Commonwealth can understand this kite without hints.

The project name for the kite was Singapore Wicket.

 

 

 

Reference: Pink

The link will open in a new tab.

The challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

An alternative sub text here would be: Just fly it.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

I experimented a while with the tail before I got the rippling effect that I was seeking.

Unfortunately I lost this kite in the sea at a kite festival in Malaysia two months later, without having noted down any measurements.

I had started, though, making a 15 m long kite, but that would’t lift. Not until I realized it needed more wind than the 30 m long one: minimum 4 m/s.

 

Bali has the strongest kite culture in the world with several unique kites, one of them is the Janggan which has a tail that usually is 20 times the wingspan. Kites with wingspans of 3 – 5 m are considered medium size; an 8 m Janggan is large and has thus a 160 m long tail. The biggest Janggan till now is the Nagaraja, which has a wingspan of 11.5 m and has a 234 m long tail. However, it is not only the length of the tail that is remarkable: it is also the rippling movement of the tail, like waves flowing from the wings down to the end of the tail.

A few years ago we, a visiting Australian kite friend and me, talked about how to use that kind of tail in a western style kite.

That idea challenged me: I wanted to make a kite where the lifting part is as invisible as possible (in contrast to the Janggan where the lifting part is very elaborated, especially the head that is richly decorated).

It took me half a year before the solution dawned on me: A simple vented wing where the sail continues directly as the tail. The Eye Phi (Eye Φ) frame was born.

I happened to have some fibre glass rods (that I bought in England 1996, and that have since then been waiting to be used) and enough of red and white ripstop to sew up a kite 1.5 m wide and with 30 m long tail. For the first trials there was not enough wind, but as soon the windspeed was higher than 3 m/s the kite lifted and flew well!

I gave the kite the name Canterbury.

Here is the hint: Sachin Tendulkar doing a Block Shot at a cricket game, protecting the wicket:

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

There is a wonderful kite festival at the Marina Barrage in Singapore. The winds are often turbulent, but the view is fantastic. This day the wind was pretty steady in an Eastern direction and I had two kites up and the Block Shot kite ready waiting on the ground. Late in the afternoon the wind shifted 100°, now coming from South East. A perfect direction, but before I had got my two kites down and got the Block Shot up the wind started to fade. A kite friend managed to take a few photos in back light though. The pictures are not perfect, so I’ll have to wait for the next opportunity.

                                  Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Some places can give an inspiration to a new kite. One is the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore as seen from the Marina Barrage. Probably only people from the Commonwealth can understand this kite without hints.

The project name for the kite was Singapore Wicket.

 

 

 

Reference: Pink

The link will open in a new tab.

The challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

An alternative sub text here would be: Just fly it.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

Now, the name Canterbury seemed to be too a far fetched pun (you had to remember from your classes on English medieval literature and Chaucer who wrote The Canterbury Tales), so I changed the name to YangTze, which both is a hommage to the origin (Janggan) and a reference to the Chinese river for the riverlike flow of the tail.

I also changed from 3 + 3 point bridle to 2 point bridle which made the kite self balancing.

Since every kite implied a lot of boring sewing I made an agreement with Kaixuan Kite in Weifang to sew them up for me.

Then I could test to stack the 15 m kites, and the stack works wonderfully: It has a wind range of 4 – 11 m/s! At 11 m/s a stack of four has a tremendous pull, but up to 7 – 8 m/s it is quite easy to handle.

I experimented a while with the tail before I got the rippling effect that I was seeking.

Unfortunately I lost this kite in the sea at a kite festival in Malaysia two months later, without having noted down any measurements.

I had started, though, making a 15 m long kite, but that would’t lift. Not until I realized it needed more wind than the 30 m long one: minimum 4 m/s.

 

Bali has the strongest kite culture in the world with several unique kites, one of them is the Janggan which has a tail that usually is 20 times the wingspan. Kites with wingspans of 3 – 5 m are considered medium size; an 8 m Janggan is large and has thus a 160 m long tail. The biggest Janggan till now is the Nagaraja, which has a wingspan of 11.5 m and has a 234 m long tail. However, it is not only the length of the tail that is remarkable: it is also the rippling movement of the tail, like waves flowing from the wings down to the end of the tail.

A few years ago we, a visiting Australian kite friend and me, talked about how to use that kind of tail in a western style kite.

That idea challenged me: I wanted to make a kite where the lifting part is as invisible as possible (in contrast to the Janggan where the lifting part is very elaborated, especially the head that is richly decorated).

It took me half a year before the solution dawned on me: A simple vented wing where the sail continues directly as the tail. The Eye Phi (Eye Φ) frame was born.

I happened to have some fibre glass rods (that I bought in England 1996, and that have since then been waiting to be used) and enough of red and white ripstop to sew up a kite 1.5 m wide and with 30 m long tail. For the first trials there was not enough wind, but as soon the windspeed was higher than 3 m/s the kite lifted and flew well!

I gave the kite the name Canterbury.

Here is the hint: Sachin Tendulkar doing a Block Shot at a cricket game, protecting the wicket:

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

There is a wonderful kite festival at the Marina Barrage in Singapore. The winds are often turbulent, but the view is fantastic. This day the wind was pretty steady in an Eastern direction and I had two kites up and the Block Shot kite ready waiting on the ground. Late in the afternoon the wind shifted 100°, now coming from South East. A perfect direction, but before I had got my two kites down and got the Block Shot up the wind started to fade. A kite friend managed to take a few photos in back light though. The pictures are not perfect, so I’ll have to wait for the next opportunity.

                                  Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Some places can give an inspiration to a new kite. One is the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore as seen from the Marina Barrage. Probably only people from the Commonwealth can understand this kite without hints.

The project name for the kite was Singapore Wicket.

 

 

 

Reference: Pink

The link will open in a new tab.

The challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

An alternative sub text here would be: Just fly it.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

YangTze Tricolor, 30m,  in Dieppe 2016

 

 

Yellow 30 Yangtze

 

Now, the name Canterbury seemed to be too a far fetched pun (you had to remember from your classes on English medieval literature and Chaucer who wrote The Canterbury Tales), so I changed the name to YangTze, which both is a hommage to the origin (Janggan) and a reference to the Chinese river for the riverlike flow of the tail.

I also changed from 3 + 3 point bridle to 2 point bridle which made the kite self balancing.

Since every kite implied a lot of boring sewing I made an agreement with Kaixuan Kite in Weifang to sew them up for me.

Then I could test to stack the 15 m kites, and the stack works wonderfully: It has a wind range of 4 – 11 m/s! At 11 m/s a stack of four has a tremendous pull, but up to 7 – 8 m/s it is quite easy to handle.

I experimented a while with the tail before I got the rippling effect that I was seeking.

Unfortunately I lost this kite in the sea at a kite festival in Malaysia two months later, without having noted down any measurements.

I had started, though, making a 15 m long kite, but that would’t lift. Not until I realized it needed more wind than the 30 m long one: minimum 4 m/s.

 

Bali has the strongest kite culture in the world with several unique kites, one of them is the Janggan which has a tail that usually is 20 times the wingspan. Kites with wingspans of 3 – 5 m are considered medium size; an 8 m Janggan is large and has thus a 160 m long tail. The biggest Janggan till now is the Nagaraja, which has a wingspan of 11.5 m and has a 234 m long tail. However, it is not only the length of the tail that is remarkable: it is also the rippling movement of the tail, like waves flowing from the wings down to the end of the tail.

A few years ago we, a visiting Australian kite friend and me, talked about how to use that kind of tail in a western style kite.

That idea challenged me: I wanted to make a kite where the lifting part is as invisible as possible (in contrast to the Janggan where the lifting part is very elaborated, especially the head that is richly decorated).

It took me half a year before the solution dawned on me: A simple vented wing where the sail continues directly as the tail. The Eye Phi (Eye Φ) frame was born.

I happened to have some fibre glass rods (that I bought in England 1996, and that have since then been waiting to be used) and enough of red and white ripstop to sew up a kite 1.5 m wide and with 30 m long tail. For the first trials there was not enough wind, but as soon the windspeed was higher than 3 m/s the kite lifted and flew well!

I gave the kite the name Canterbury.

Here is the hint: Sachin Tendulkar doing a Block Shot at a cricket game, protecting the wicket:

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

There is a wonderful kite festival at the Marina Barrage in Singapore. The winds are often turbulent, but the view is fantastic. This day the wind was pretty steady in an Eastern direction and I had two kites up and the Block Shot kite ready waiting on the ground. Late in the afternoon the wind shifted 100°, now coming from South East. A perfect direction, but before I had got my two kites down and got the Block Shot up the wind started to fade. A kite friend managed to take a few photos in back light though. The pictures are not perfect, so I’ll have to wait for the next opportunity.

                                  Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Some places can give an inspiration to a new kite. One is the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore as seen from the Marina Barrage. Probably only people from the Commonwealth can understand this kite without hints.

The project name for the kite was Singapore Wicket.

 

 

 

Reference: Pink

The link will open in a new tab.

The challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

An alternative sub text here would be: Just fly it.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

The Butterfly is a kite which I am a bit surprised that no-one has made before. It is an obvious pun! The small butter containers you get on aeroplanes and restaurants: just make the lid fly and there is a Butterfly!

                                     Note that there is a genuine butter-fly in the picture 

I had had the idea for many years, but it it wasn’t until a trip to China where I found the quality bamboo in the correct dimension that I could start making it.

This is what I posted on Facebook in January 2016:

Sometimes I get the feeling that I actually have aquired some understanding and know how to apply it. Today was such a time.

I need a frame for a new project: a rectangular kite, portrait orientation with rounded corners. Single point bridle and preferably a little bit flexible wings.

So starting off from my A-kross frame and with inspiration from Li RuoXin’s small kites I bent some bamboo last night and put it on a trash skin.

I thought the wind of today would not be strong enough (1 – 2 m/s), but lo and behold: the kite took off into the air and flew *steady* on the towing point I had chosen!

YangTze Tricolor, 30m,  in Dieppe 2016

 

 

Yellow 30 Yangtze

 

Now, the name Canterbury seemed to be too a far fetched pun (you had to remember from your classes on English medieval literature and Chaucer who wrote The Canterbury Tales), so I changed the name to YangTze, which both is a hommage to the origin (Janggan) and a reference to the Chinese river for the riverlike flow of the tail.

I also changed from 3 + 3 point bridle to 2 point bridle which made the kite self balancing.

Since every kite implied a lot of boring sewing I made an agreement with Kaixuan Kite in Weifang to sew them up for me.

Then I could test to stack the 15 m kites, and the stack works wonderfully: It has a wind range of 4 – 11 m/s! At 11 m/s a stack of four has a tremendous pull, but up to 7 – 8 m/s it is quite easy to handle.

I experimented a while with the tail before I got the rippling effect that I was seeking.

Unfortunately I lost this kite in the sea at a kite festival in Malaysia two months later, without having noted down any measurements.

I had started, though, making a 15 m long kite, but that would’t lift. Not until I realized it needed more wind than the 30 m long one: minimum 4 m/s.

 

Bali has the strongest kite culture in the world with several unique kites, one of them is the Janggan which has a tail that usually is 20 times the wingspan. Kites with wingspans of 3 – 5 m are considered medium size; an 8 m Janggan is large and has thus a 160 m long tail. The biggest Janggan till now is the Nagaraja, which has a wingspan of 11.5 m and has a 234 m long tail. However, it is not only the length of the tail that is remarkable: it is also the rippling movement of the tail, like waves flowing from the wings down to the end of the tail.

A few years ago we, a visiting Australian kite friend and me, talked about how to use that kind of tail in a western style kite.

That idea challenged me: I wanted to make a kite where the lifting part is as invisible as possible (in contrast to the Janggan where the lifting part is very elaborated, especially the head that is richly decorated).

It took me half a year before the solution dawned on me: A simple vented wing where the sail continues directly as the tail. The Eye Phi (Eye Φ) frame was born.

I happened to have some fibre glass rods (that I bought in England 1996, and that have since then been waiting to be used) and enough of red and white ripstop to sew up a kite 1.5 m wide and with 30 m long tail. For the first trials there was not enough wind, but as soon the windspeed was higher than 3 m/s the kite lifted and flew well!

I gave the kite the name Canterbury.

Here is the hint: Sachin Tendulkar doing a Block Shot at a cricket game, protecting the wicket:

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

There is a wonderful kite festival at the Marina Barrage in Singapore. The winds are often turbulent, but the view is fantastic. This day the wind was pretty steady in an Eastern direction and I had two kites up and the Block Shot kite ready waiting on the ground. Late in the afternoon the wind shifted 100°, now coming from South East. A perfect direction, but before I had got my two kites down and got the Block Shot up the wind started to fade. A kite friend managed to take a few photos in back light though. The pictures are not perfect, so I’ll have to wait for the next opportunity.

                                  Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Some places can give an inspiration to a new kite. One is the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore as seen from the Marina Barrage. Probably only people from the Commonwealth can understand this kite without hints.

The project name for the kite was Singapore Wicket.

 

 

 

Reference: Pink

The link will open in a new tab.

The challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

An alternative sub text here would be: Just fly it.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

First Butterfly out is the slightly salted Danish Lurpak, 7g

The Butterfly is a kite which I am a bit surprised that no-one has made before. It is an obvious pun! The small butter containers you get on aeroplanes and restaurants: just make the lid fly and there is a Butterfly!

                                     Note that there is a genuine butter-fly in the picture 

I had had the idea for many years, but it it wasn’t until a trip to China where I found the quality bamboo in the correct dimension that I could start making it.

This is what I posted on Facebook in January 2016:

Sometimes I get the feeling that I actually have aquired some understanding and know how to apply it. Today was such a time.

I need a frame for a new project: a rectangular kite, portrait orientation with rounded corners. Single point bridle and preferably a little bit flexible wings.

So starting off from my A-kross frame and with inspiration from Li RuoXin’s small kites I bent some bamboo last night and put it on a trash skin.

I thought the wind of today would not be strong enough (1 – 2 m/s), but lo and behold: the kite took off into the air and flew *steady* on the towing point I had chosen!

YangTze Tricolor, 30m,  in Dieppe 2016

 

 

Yellow 30 Yangtze

 

Now, the name Canterbury seemed to be too a far fetched pun (you had to remember from your classes on English medieval literature and Chaucer who wrote The Canterbury Tales), so I changed the name to YangTze, which both is a hommage to the origin (Janggan) and a reference to the Chinese river for the riverlike flow of the tail.

I also changed from 3 + 3 point bridle to 2 point bridle which made the kite self balancing.

Since every kite implied a lot of boring sewing I made an agreement with Kaixuan Kite in Weifang to sew them up for me.

Then I could test to stack the 15 m kites, and the stack works wonderfully: It has a wind range of 4 – 11 m/s! At 11 m/s a stack of four has a tremendous pull, but up to 7 – 8 m/s it is quite easy to handle.

I experimented a while with the tail before I got the rippling effect that I was seeking.

Unfortunately I lost this kite in the sea at a kite festival in Malaysia two months later, without having noted down any measurements.

I had started, though, making a 15 m long kite, but that would’t lift. Not until I realized it needed more wind than the 30 m long one: minimum 4 m/s.

 

Bali has the strongest kite culture in the world with several unique kites, one of them is the Janggan which has a tail that usually is 20 times the wingspan. Kites with wingspans of 3 – 5 m are considered medium size; an 8 m Janggan is large and has thus a 160 m long tail. The biggest Janggan till now is the Nagaraja, which has a wingspan of 11.5 m and has a 234 m long tail. However, it is not only the length of the tail that is remarkable: it is also the rippling movement of the tail, like waves flowing from the wings down to the end of the tail.

A few years ago we, a visiting Australian kite friend and me, talked about how to use that kind of tail in a western style kite.

That idea challenged me: I wanted to make a kite where the lifting part is as invisible as possible (in contrast to the Janggan where the lifting part is very elaborated, especially the head that is richly decorated).

It took me half a year before the solution dawned on me: A simple vented wing where the sail continues directly as the tail. The Eye Phi (Eye Φ) frame was born.

I happened to have some fibre glass rods (that I bought in England 1996, and that have since then been waiting to be used) and enough of red and white ripstop to sew up a kite 1.5 m wide and with 30 m long tail. For the first trials there was not enough wind, but as soon the windspeed was higher than 3 m/s the kite lifted and flew well!

I gave the kite the name Canterbury.

Here is the hint: Sachin Tendulkar doing a Block Shot at a cricket game, protecting the wicket:

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

There is a wonderful kite festival at the Marina Barrage in Singapore. The winds are often turbulent, but the view is fantastic. This day the wind was pretty steady in an Eastern direction and I had two kites up and the Block Shot kite ready waiting on the ground. Late in the afternoon the wind shifted 100°, now coming from South East. A perfect direction, but before I had got my two kites down and got the Block Shot up the wind started to fade. A kite friend managed to take a few photos in back light though. The pictures are not perfect, so I’ll have to wait for the next opportunity.

                                  Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Some places can give an inspiration to a new kite. One is the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore as seen from the Marina Barrage. Probably only people from the Commonwealth can understand this kite without hints.

The project name for the kite was Singapore Wicket.

 

 

 

Reference: Pink

The link will open in a new tab.

The challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

An alternative sub text here would be: Just fly it.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

Second out was the slightly heavier Australian Liv.

First Butterfly out is the slightly salted Danish Lurpak, 7g

The Butterfly is a kite which I am a bit surprised that no-one has made before. It is an obvious pun! The small butter containers you get on aeroplanes and restaurants: just make the lid fly and there is a Butterfly!

                                     Note that there is a genuine butter-fly in the picture 

I had had the idea for many years, but it it wasn’t until a trip to China where I found the quality bamboo in the correct dimension that I could start making it.

This is what I posted on Facebook in January 2016:

Sometimes I get the feeling that I actually have aquired some understanding and know how to apply it. Today was such a time.

I need a frame for a new project: a rectangular kite, portrait orientation with rounded corners. Single point bridle and preferably a little bit flexible wings.

So starting off from my A-kross frame and with inspiration from Li RuoXin’s small kites I bent some bamboo last night and put it on a trash skin.

I thought the wind of today would not be strong enough (1 – 2 m/s), but lo and behold: the kite took off into the air and flew *steady* on the towing point I had chosen!

YangTze Tricolor, 30m,  in Dieppe 2016

 

 

Yellow 30 Yangtze

 

Now, the name Canterbury seemed to be too a far fetched pun (you had to remember from your classes on English medieval literature and Chaucer who wrote The Canterbury Tales), so I changed the name to YangTze, which both is a hommage to the origin (Janggan) and a reference to the Chinese river for the riverlike flow of the tail.

I also changed from 3 + 3 point bridle to 2 point bridle which made the kite self balancing.

Since every kite implied a lot of boring sewing I made an agreement with Kaixuan Kite in Weifang to sew them up for me.

Then I could test to stack the 15 m kites, and the stack works wonderfully: It has a wind range of 4 – 11 m/s! At 11 m/s a stack of four has a tremendous pull, but up to 7 – 8 m/s it is quite easy to handle.

I experimented a while with the tail before I got the rippling effect that I was seeking.

Unfortunately I lost this kite in the sea at a kite festival in Malaysia two months later, without having noted down any measurements.

I had started, though, making a 15 m long kite, but that would’t lift. Not until I realized it needed more wind than the 30 m long one: minimum 4 m/s.

 

Bali has the strongest kite culture in the world with several unique kites, one of them is the Janggan which has a tail that usually is 20 times the wingspan. Kites with wingspans of 3 – 5 m are considered medium size; an 8 m Janggan is large and has thus a 160 m long tail. The biggest Janggan till now is the Nagaraja, which has a wingspan of 11.5 m and has a 234 m long tail. However, it is not only the length of the tail that is remarkable: it is also the rippling movement of the tail, like waves flowing from the wings down to the end of the tail.

A few years ago we, a visiting Australian kite friend and me, talked about how to use that kind of tail in a western style kite.

That idea challenged me: I wanted to make a kite where the lifting part is as invisible as possible (in contrast to the Janggan where the lifting part is very elaborated, especially the head that is richly decorated).

It took me half a year before the solution dawned on me: A simple vented wing where the sail continues directly as the tail. The Eye Phi (Eye Φ) frame was born.

I happened to have some fibre glass rods (that I bought in England 1996, and that have since then been waiting to be used) and enough of red and white ripstop to sew up a kite 1.5 m wide and with 30 m long tail. For the first trials there was not enough wind, but as soon the windspeed was higher than 3 m/s the kite lifted and flew well!

I gave the kite the name Canterbury.

Here is the hint: Sachin Tendulkar doing a Block Shot at a cricket game, protecting the wicket:

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

There is a wonderful kite festival at the Marina Barrage in Singapore. The winds are often turbulent, but the view is fantastic. This day the wind was pretty steady in an Eastern direction and I had two kites up and the Block Shot kite ready waiting on the ground. Late in the afternoon the wind shifted 100°, now coming from South East. A perfect direction, but before I had got my two kites down and got the Block Shot up the wind started to fade. A kite friend managed to take a few photos in back light though. The pictures are not perfect, so I’ll have to wait for the next opportunity.

                                  Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Some places can give an inspiration to a new kite. One is the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore as seen from the Marina Barrage. Probably only people from the Commonwealth can understand this kite without hints.

The project name for the kite was Singapore Wicket.

 

 

 

Reference: Pink

The link will open in a new tab.

The challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

An alternative sub text here would be: Just fly it.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

Australian Liv, 10 g

Second out was the slightly heavier Australian Liv.

First Butterfly out is the slightly salted Danish Lurpak, 7g

The Butterfly is a kite which I am a bit surprised that no-one has made before. It is an obvious pun! The small butter containers you get on aeroplanes and restaurants: just make the lid fly and there is a Butterfly!

                                     Note that there is a genuine butter-fly in the picture 

I had had the idea for many years, but it it wasn’t until a trip to China where I found the quality bamboo in the correct dimension that I could start making it.

This is what I posted on Facebook in January 2016:

Sometimes I get the feeling that I actually have aquired some understanding and know how to apply it. Today was such a time.

I need a frame for a new project: a rectangular kite, portrait orientation with rounded corners. Single point bridle and preferably a little bit flexible wings.

So starting off from my A-kross frame and with inspiration from Li RuoXin’s small kites I bent some bamboo last night and put it on a trash skin.

I thought the wind of today would not be strong enough (1 – 2 m/s), but lo and behold: the kite took off into the air and flew *steady* on the towing point I had chosen!

YangTze Tricolor, 30m,  in Dieppe 2016

 

 

Yellow 30 Yangtze

 

Now, the name Canterbury seemed to be too a far fetched pun (you had to remember from your classes on English medieval literature and Chaucer who wrote The Canterbury Tales), so I changed the name to YangTze, which both is a hommage to the origin (Janggan) and a reference to the Chinese river for the riverlike flow of the tail.

I also changed from 3 + 3 point bridle to 2 point bridle which made the kite self balancing.

Since every kite implied a lot of boring sewing I made an agreement with Kaixuan Kite in Weifang to sew them up for me.

Then I could test to stack the 15 m kites, and the stack works wonderfully: It has a wind range of 4 – 11 m/s! At 11 m/s a stack of four has a tremendous pull, but up to 7 – 8 m/s it is quite easy to handle.

I experimented a while with the tail before I got the rippling effect that I was seeking.

Unfortunately I lost this kite in the sea at a kite festival in Malaysia two months later, without having noted down any measurements.

I had started, though, making a 15 m long kite, but that would’t lift. Not until I realized it needed more wind than the 30 m long one: minimum 4 m/s.

 

Bali has the strongest kite culture in the world with several unique kites, one of them is the Janggan which has a tail that usually is 20 times the wingspan. Kites with wingspans of 3 – 5 m are considered medium size; an 8 m Janggan is large and has thus a 160 m long tail. The biggest Janggan till now is the Nagaraja, which has a wingspan of 11.5 m and has a 234 m long tail. However, it is not only the length of the tail that is remarkable: it is also the rippling movement of the tail, like waves flowing from the wings down to the end of the tail.

A few years ago we, a visiting Australian kite friend and me, talked about how to use that kind of tail in a western style kite.

That idea challenged me: I wanted to make a kite where the lifting part is as invisible as possible (in contrast to the Janggan where the lifting part is very elaborated, especially the head that is richly decorated).

It took me half a year before the solution dawned on me: A simple vented wing where the sail continues directly as the tail. The Eye Phi (Eye Φ) frame was born.

I happened to have some fibre glass rods (that I bought in England 1996, and that have since then been waiting to be used) and enough of red and white ripstop to sew up a kite 1.5 m wide and with 30 m long tail. For the first trials there was not enough wind, but as soon the windspeed was higher than 3 m/s the kite lifted and flew well!

I gave the kite the name Canterbury.

Here is the hint: Sachin Tendulkar doing a Block Shot at a cricket game, protecting the wicket:

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

There is a wonderful kite festival at the Marina Barrage in Singapore. The winds are often turbulent, but the view is fantastic. This day the wind was pretty steady in an Eastern direction and I had two kites up and the Block Shot kite ready waiting on the ground. Late in the afternoon the wind shifted 100°, now coming from South East. A perfect direction, but before I had got my two kites down and got the Block Shot up the wind started to fade. A kite friend managed to take a few photos in back light though. The pictures are not perfect, so I’ll have to wait for the next opportunity.

                                  Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Some places can give an inspiration to a new kite. One is the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore as seen from the Marina Barrage. Probably only people from the Commonwealth can understand this kite without hints.

The project name for the kite was Singapore Wicket.

 

 

 

Reference: Pink

The link will open in a new tab.

The challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

An alternative sub text here would be: Just fly it.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

The Anchor butter from New Zealand comes in many variations: Salted 7 g, Salted 10 g, Salted Chinese and even Unsalted.

Australian Liv, 10 g

Second out was the slightly heavier Australian Liv.

First Butterfly out is the slightly salted Danish Lurpak, 7g

The Butterfly is a kite which I am a bit surprised that no-one has made before. It is an obvious pun! The small butter containers you get on aeroplanes and restaurants: just make the lid fly and there is a Butterfly!

                                     Note that there is a genuine butter-fly in the picture 

I had had the idea for many years, but it it wasn’t until a trip to China where I found the quality bamboo in the correct dimension that I could start making it.

This is what I posted on Facebook in January 2016:

Sometimes I get the feeling that I actually have aquired some understanding and know how to apply it. Today was such a time.

I need a frame for a new project: a rectangular kite, portrait orientation with rounded corners. Single point bridle and preferably a little bit flexible wings.

So starting off from my A-kross frame and with inspiration from Li RuoXin’s small kites I bent some bamboo last night and put it on a trash skin.

I thought the wind of today would not be strong enough (1 – 2 m/s), but lo and behold: the kite took off into the air and flew *steady* on the towing point I had chosen!

YangTze Tricolor, 30m,  in Dieppe 2016

 

 

Yellow 30 Yangtze

 

Now, the name Canterbury seemed to be too a far fetched pun (you had to remember from your classes on English medieval literature and Chaucer who wrote The Canterbury Tales), so I changed the name to YangTze, which both is a hommage to the origin (Janggan) and a reference to the Chinese river for the riverlike flow of the tail.

I also changed from 3 + 3 point bridle to 2 point bridle which made the kite self balancing.

Since every kite implied a lot of boring sewing I made an agreement with Kaixuan Kite in Weifang to sew them up for me.

Then I could test to stack the 15 m kites, and the stack works wonderfully: It has a wind range of 4 – 11 m/s! At 11 m/s a stack of four has a tremendous pull, but up to 7 – 8 m/s it is quite easy to handle.

I experimented a while with the tail before I got the rippling effect that I was seeking.

Unfortunately I lost this kite in the sea at a kite festival in Malaysia two months later, without having noted down any measurements.

I had started, though, making a 15 m long kite, but that would’t lift. Not until I realized it needed more wind than the 30 m long one: minimum 4 m/s.

 

Bali has the strongest kite culture in the world with several unique kites, one of them is the Janggan which has a tail that usually is 20 times the wingspan. Kites with wingspans of 3 – 5 m are considered medium size; an 8 m Janggan is large and has thus a 160 m long tail. The biggest Janggan till now is the Nagaraja, which has a wingspan of 11.5 m and has a 234 m long tail. However, it is not only the length of the tail that is remarkable: it is also the rippling movement of the tail, like waves flowing from the wings down to the end of the tail.

A few years ago we, a visiting Australian kite friend and me, talked about how to use that kind of tail in a western style kite.

That idea challenged me: I wanted to make a kite where the lifting part is as invisible as possible (in contrast to the Janggan where the lifting part is very elaborated, especially the head that is richly decorated).

It took me half a year before the solution dawned on me: A simple vented wing where the sail continues directly as the tail. The Eye Phi (Eye Φ) frame was born.

I happened to have some fibre glass rods (that I bought in England 1996, and that have since then been waiting to be used) and enough of red and white ripstop to sew up a kite 1.5 m wide and with 30 m long tail. For the first trials there was not enough wind, but as soon the windspeed was higher than 3 m/s the kite lifted and flew well!

I gave the kite the name Canterbury.

Here is the hint: Sachin Tendulkar doing a Block Shot at a cricket game, protecting the wicket:

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

There is a wonderful kite festival at the Marina Barrage in Singapore. The winds are often turbulent, but the view is fantastic. This day the wind was pretty steady in an Eastern direction and I had two kites up and the Block Shot kite ready waiting on the ground. Late in the afternoon the wind shifted 100°, now coming from South East. A perfect direction, but before I had got my two kites down and got the Block Shot up the wind started to fade. A kite friend managed to take a few photos in back light though. The pictures are not perfect, so I’ll have to wait for the next opportunity.

                                  Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Some places can give an inspiration to a new kite. One is the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore as seen from the Marina Barrage. Probably only people from the Commonwealth can understand this kite without hints.

The project name for the kite was Singapore Wicket.

 

 

 

Reference: Pink

The link will open in a new tab.

The challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

An alternative sub text here would be: Just fly it.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

New Zealand Anchor, 10g

The Anchor butter from New Zealand comes in many variations: Salted 7 g, Salted 10 g, Salted Chinese and even Unsalted.

Australian Liv, 10 g

Second out was the slightly heavier Australian Liv.

First Butterfly out is the slightly salted Danish Lurpak, 7g

The Butterfly is a kite which I am a bit surprised that no-one has made before. It is an obvious pun! The small butter containers you get on aeroplanes and restaurants: just make the lid fly and there is a Butterfly!

                                     Note that there is a genuine butter-fly in the picture 

I had had the idea for many years, but it it wasn’t until a trip to China where I found the quality bamboo in the correct dimension that I could start making it.

This is what I posted on Facebook in January 2016:

Sometimes I get the feeling that I actually have aquired some understanding and know how to apply it. Today was such a time.

I need a frame for a new project: a rectangular kite, portrait orientation with rounded corners. Single point bridle and preferably a little bit flexible wings.

So starting off from my A-kross frame and with inspiration from Li RuoXin’s small kites I bent some bamboo last night and put it on a trash skin.

I thought the wind of today would not be strong enough (1 – 2 m/s), but lo and behold: the kite took off into the air and flew *steady* on the towing point I had chosen!

YangTze Tricolor, 30m,  in Dieppe 2016

 

 

Yellow 30 Yangtze

 

Now, the name Canterbury seemed to be too a far fetched pun (you had to remember from your classes on English medieval literature and Chaucer who wrote The Canterbury Tales), so I changed the name to YangTze, which both is a hommage to the origin (Janggan) and a reference to the Chinese river for the riverlike flow of the tail.

I also changed from 3 + 3 point bridle to 2 point bridle which made the kite self balancing.

Since every kite implied a lot of boring sewing I made an agreement with Kaixuan Kite in Weifang to sew them up for me.

Then I could test to stack the 15 m kites, and the stack works wonderfully: It has a wind range of 4 – 11 m/s! At 11 m/s a stack of four has a tremendous pull, but up to 7 – 8 m/s it is quite easy to handle.

I experimented a while with the tail before I got the rippling effect that I was seeking.

Unfortunately I lost this kite in the sea at a kite festival in Malaysia two months later, without having noted down any measurements.

I had started, though, making a 15 m long kite, but that would’t lift. Not until I realized it needed more wind than the 30 m long one: minimum 4 m/s.

 

Bali has the strongest kite culture in the world with several unique kites, one of them is the Janggan which has a tail that usually is 20 times the wingspan. Kites with wingspans of 3 – 5 m are considered medium size; an 8 m Janggan is large and has thus a 160 m long tail. The biggest Janggan till now is the Nagaraja, which has a wingspan of 11.5 m and has a 234 m long tail. However, it is not only the length of the tail that is remarkable: it is also the rippling movement of the tail, like waves flowing from the wings down to the end of the tail.

A few years ago we, a visiting Australian kite friend and me, talked about how to use that kind of tail in a western style kite.

That idea challenged me: I wanted to make a kite where the lifting part is as invisible as possible (in contrast to the Janggan where the lifting part is very elaborated, especially the head that is richly decorated).

It took me half a year before the solution dawned on me: A simple vented wing where the sail continues directly as the tail. The Eye Phi (Eye Φ) frame was born.

I happened to have some fibre glass rods (that I bought in England 1996, and that have since then been waiting to be used) and enough of red and white ripstop to sew up a kite 1.5 m wide and with 30 m long tail. For the first trials there was not enough wind, but as soon the windspeed was higher than 3 m/s the kite lifted and flew well!

I gave the kite the name Canterbury.

Here is the hint: Sachin Tendulkar doing a Block Shot at a cricket game, protecting the wicket:

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

There is a wonderful kite festival at the Marina Barrage in Singapore. The winds are often turbulent, but the view is fantastic. This day the wind was pretty steady in an Eastern direction and I had two kites up and the Block Shot kite ready waiting on the ground. Late in the afternoon the wind shifted 100°, now coming from South East. A perfect direction, but before I had got my two kites down and got the Block Shot up the wind started to fade. A kite friend managed to take a few photos in back light though. The pictures are not perfect, so I’ll have to wait for the next opportunity.

                                  Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Some places can give an inspiration to a new kite. One is the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore as seen from the Marina Barrage. Probably only people from the Commonwealth can understand this kite without hints.

The project name for the kite was Singapore Wicket.

 

 

 

Reference: Pink

The link will open in a new tab.

The challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

An alternative sub text here would be: Just fly it.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.

Emborg is a second butterfly from Denmark. It is meta-butterfly in that there are two butterflies depicted on it!

New Zealand Anchor, 10g

The Anchor butter from New Zealand comes in many variations: Salted 7 g, Salted 10 g, Salted Chinese and even Unsalted.

Australian Liv, 10 g

Second out was the slightly heavier Australian Liv.

First Butterfly out is the slightly salted Danish Lurpak, 7g

The Butterfly is a kite which I am a bit surprised that no-one has made before. It is an obvious pun! The small butter containers you get on aeroplanes and restaurants: just make the lid fly and there is a Butterfly!

                                     Note that there is a genuine butter-fly in the picture 

I had had the idea for many years, but it it wasn’t until a trip to China where I found the quality bamboo in the correct dimension that I could start making it.

This is what I posted on Facebook in January 2016:

Sometimes I get the feeling that I actually have aquired some understanding and know how to apply it. Today was such a time.

I need a frame for a new project: a rectangular kite, portrait orientation with rounded corners. Single point bridle and preferably a little bit flexible wings.

So starting off from my A-kross frame and with inspiration from Li RuoXin’s small kites I bent some bamboo last night and put it on a trash skin.

I thought the wind of today would not be strong enough (1 – 2 m/s), but lo and behold: the kite took off into the air and flew *steady* on the towing point I had chosen!

YangTze Tricolor, 30m,  in Dieppe 2016

 

 

Yellow 30 Yangtze

 

Now, the name Canterbury seemed to be too a far fetched pun (you had to remember from your classes on English medieval literature and Chaucer who wrote The Canterbury Tales), so I changed the name to YangTze, which both is a hommage to the origin (Janggan) and a reference to the Chinese river for the riverlike flow of the tail.

I also changed from 3 + 3 point bridle to 2 point bridle which made the kite self balancing.

Since every kite implied a lot of boring sewing I made an agreement with Kaixuan Kite in Weifang to sew them up for me.

Then I could test to stack the 15 m kites, and the stack works wonderfully: It has a wind range of 4 – 11 m/s! At 11 m/s a stack of four has a tremendous pull, but up to 7 – 8 m/s it is quite easy to handle.

I experimented a while with the tail before I got the rippling effect that I was seeking.

Unfortunately I lost this kite in the sea at a kite festival in Malaysia two months later, without having noted down any measurements.

I had started, though, making a 15 m long kite, but that would’t lift. Not until I realized it needed more wind than the 30 m long one: minimum 4 m/s.

 

Bali has the strongest kite culture in the world with several unique kites, one of them is the Janggan which has a tail that usually is 20 times the wingspan. Kites with wingspans of 3 – 5 m are considered medium size; an 8 m Janggan is large and has thus a 160 m long tail. The biggest Janggan till now is the Nagaraja, which has a wingspan of 11.5 m and has a 234 m long tail. However, it is not only the length of the tail that is remarkable: it is also the rippling movement of the tail, like waves flowing from the wings down to the end of the tail.

A few years ago we, a visiting Australian kite friend and me, talked about how to use that kind of tail in a western style kite.

That idea challenged me: I wanted to make a kite where the lifting part is as invisible as possible (in contrast to the Janggan where the lifting part is very elaborated, especially the head that is richly decorated).

It took me half a year before the solution dawned on me: A simple vented wing where the sail continues directly as the tail. The Eye Phi (Eye Φ) frame was born.

I happened to have some fibre glass rods (that I bought in England 1996, and that have since then been waiting to be used) and enough of red and white ripstop to sew up a kite 1.5 m wide and with 30 m long tail. For the first trials there was not enough wind, but as soon the windspeed was higher than 3 m/s the kite lifted and flew well!

I gave the kite the name Canterbury.

Here is the hint: Sachin Tendulkar doing a Block Shot at a cricket game, protecting the wicket:

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

There is a wonderful kite festival at the Marina Barrage in Singapore. The winds are often turbulent, but the view is fantastic. This day the wind was pretty steady in an Eastern direction and I had two kites up and the Block Shot kite ready waiting on the ground. Late in the afternoon the wind shifted 100°, now coming from South East. A perfect direction, but before I had got my two kites down and got the Block Shot up the wind started to fade. A kite friend managed to take a few photos in back light though. The pictures are not perfect, so I’ll have to wait for the next opportunity.

                                  Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Picture courtesy Erich Chew

Some places can give an inspiration to a new kite. One is the Marina Bay Sands hotel in Singapore as seen from the Marina Barrage. Probably only people from the Commonwealth can understand this kite without hints.

The project name for the kite was Singapore Wicket.

 

 

 

Reference: Pink

The link will open in a new tab.

The challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

An alternative sub text here would be: Just fly it.

When I made the Inflation I found that this design, Poster, was perfect for displaying simple images. Furthermore a Poster kite is a wonderful light wind kite. I am very thankful to Claude & Francis Paragon who have made the design (based on an Ohashi kite they told me) available.

Here is a challenge: in a brand name, replace one letter and then reshuffle the letters!

On a kite festival somewhere I noted the frenzy of putting human eyes on everything, even object that don’t have eyes. Time for me to make a kite with only eyes.

I cut out the eyes from the Benjamin Franklin impersonation, and since I already had found a good name for the kite, Eye D, I needed to add some semi 3D features to the image. This was done by colour separation and sliding one layer sidewards.

With anaglyphic glasses on, and with the kite not too high up, many viewers find that the 3D effect actually works!

This was the second spin-off from the Money Laundry kite!

While I was struggling to get the box kite stable I suddenly realized that a dollar bill has the shape of a Poster kite. I took one of the bills and tested it with a Poster frame, and as it looked good I had a much larger dollar bill printed; in fact as big as the printing machine could make it –  100 x 240 cm.

A friend of mine suggested the name Inflation, and this was the first spin-off from the Money Laundry kite.

Since US Dollar is the most global of the currencies it seemed obvious to use that, but with a little tweak. On the front Benjamin Franklin has been replaced by Your’s Truly, and on the backside the statement reads IN KITE WE TRUST.

I think I got the idea for the Benjamin Franklin replacement from a local Currency Changer in Bali which I walked pass several times a week. On the wall outside they had this huge 100$ bill with Benjamin Franklin in 3D. At one occasion they were repairing it, and it hit me that it looked like an old photo of me. Then some Photoshopping started.

Nowadays on kite festivals there tends to be more line laundry than actual kites in the air. I felt I needed to partake, but still having a genuine kite.

I built the laundry machine of Nylon paper and bamboo sticks, but I had so much trouble getting it too fly stable. That was frustrating, because there should be nothing more simple than making a box kite!

In the end I found that the error was caused by the bamboo sticks: they had different stiffness and bent unsymmetrically in higher winds and caused the box to crash. After changing to carbon fiber tubes the flight was finally steady.

 

This Malay version works well in both Malaysia and Indonesia.

The Arab version I have so far only flown once; in Doha. There was not much of a reaction.

Some people are indifferent when they look at the kite, some giggle (sometimes in an embarrassed way), some laugh out loud, some nudge their friend to read the text too. Occasionally there is an applause, but most of the times there is an appreciating smile  – ‘You got me’

A good friend in Weifang made this translation for me and her translation was a success; I often get the above reactions.

There is one thing with short chunks of written text: your eyes just automatically reads them! You meet people on  the street wearing T-shirts with print on the chest, any you read the print!

I wanted to create a small piece of text that made people react.

I wanted to make the text a little bit difficult to read at a glance; it should need a bit of concentration to read it.

The first kite I made as FFR – Flat Fat Rok

Sweden is a country with no kite tradition whatsoever, but sometimes I like to make kites with a connection to Sweden.

In 1891 Swedish inventor Johan Petter Johansson received a patent for an improved design of the adjustable spanner that is still used today. He had his own business, Enköpings Mekaniska Verkstad (the Mechanical Workshop of Enköping), but made an agreement with the company B.A. Hjorth & Company [BAHCO], also located in Enköping, to distribute his tools worldwide under the “Bahco” trademark. The Bahco tools became greatly successful, and the company is still in operation and has manufactured over 100 million wrenches to date.

I asked my brother Ragnar to send a picture of one of his many Bahco spanners, and he kindly obliged.

I made the kite of bamboo and Nylon Paper, and the length of the kite is 200 cm. It is dismountable to fit in a 40 x 60 cm envelope.

 

Finally I found a frame that when I had made 10 kites, 8 of them would fly directly and at least one more would fly after some tweaking. This was good enough, so I settled for this one.

I call the frame Square Swede, and it has a kick-up front.

And it was time to add the graphic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There was a discussion on Facebook about the size of a kite and how it should be measured; if tail should be included or not etc.

I decided to make a kite that was an exact measurement, and to make this a challenge it should be single point and, of course, tail free.

The shape should be a small square with a side of 30.48 cm, i.e. a foot.

I  made many experiments using Nylon Paper and different frames in bamboo, and it didn’t take long till I found a frame that worked. However, when I made 10 of the same only 2 of them would fly; that was too low a yield, so I kept on experimenting.