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just clownin around

Another beautiful day in paradise, the wind is blowing and the sun is shining. It looks to be a nice day to fly, but I probably will not be able to make it to the field today. I flew the Revs twice last week and I just wanna fly them more and more. But there is lots of flying time ahead. The summer is coming quick and it is sure to be a blast.

My wonderful wife gave me a Prism 4D for our anniversary. It's on the way and should be here soon. She tried to get a BKF edition but even though High Winds says they still have one, they do not. She eventually decided to get it from Harbor Wind as she had a coupon from them. So... our "4D watch" begins. I will let you know more about the 4D when it gets here, but i am very excited about this kite. You can see it by going to our "Wish List" and clicking on its link there.

Getting back to the Clownfish project... When we last left this project I was using scissors to cut the ripstop i purchased locally from Joanne's Fabrics. This is not fabric you want to use for kites, but this was before I had three quarter ripstop from kitebuilder.com. I purchased their ripstop sampler and now i have plenty of material to work with. But this project came before then. So the fabric frays everywhere that the scissors cut and everything needed to be hemmed.

I left the project to work on Spike once the new ripstop showed up. So what we had at that point was some orange fish sides, with little white pieces attached. It looks like this:

When this was first cut, i traced through the fabric and then cut on the lines. I was not precise in either tracing or cutting and felt i could deal with the lack of precision once i was sewing. This works but it has become very clear to me that if you think out your plan well and are as precise as possible then it is much easier to sew items together. In other words, if you cut one one piece with a quarter inch border and its adjoining piece with an eighth of an inch border, it's very possible to sew the two items together perfectly, but it sure is easier if both borders were the same size so you can line up the edges, instead of the traced lines.

But now I am hot cutting. This changes everything. Now i can have a template that is sized perfectly and the iron cuts exactly around the edge of the template. All while it seals the fabric with heat so it does not fray. It's such a change in precision, almost like a laser cut.

Now the Clownfish needs four fins and a bunch of black accent lines. So the first thing to do at this point is to cut some templates and get started on some fins.

Here are the pics, more tomorrow.

Kites Flown:

Kites Flown:

iFlite #1217 (blue vented)

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Kite Journal

Tuesday April 23rd, 2013

A Finny Thing Happened

Kites Flown: