I am thinking Spring today. As a child we had some wonderful fields in the neighborhood we lived in and one of the best activities we enjoyed was kite flying. My father knew how to hand make kites and drew great joy from it. We never bought a kite from a store when I grew up we made ours from dowel rods or straight sticks, string, paste and newspaper. We children especially liked to use the colorful "funny papers" or cartoons.
We made two different types of kites for our flying pleasure. One was the basic kite which believe it or not I found the regular diamond shape to be the harder kite to make although it was easier to fly. The box kite was such an easy kite to make and was my favorite to make because it was so easy. The box kite was harder to get up into the sky and to keep it up once it was there. We would use bold colored pieces of lightweight fabrics for "tails" which would make them even more beautiful when we flew them. My father could fly either style equally well and loved to help us get our kites into the sky and would run between us helping us keep our kites up if we needed help. We would spend days getting our kites made just how we wanted them and then days flying them. We loved this springtime activity. Oh how I long for spring this year.
Please notice the instructions for kite making in the above photo..
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