Welcome to Windstock.net

line line eveywhere a line

The clownfish is going really well despite what I was expecting. This was just a practice project to give me some experience with the sewing machine and with inflatables. That plan is going perfectly as I am having to deal with lots of different tasks with this little fish. It has been lots of fun, which is the best part of all.

I guess i need to backtrack a tad... First of all, what I am working on right now is a plan by Bernhard Dingwert. He has five inflatable kite plans on his site at www.drachenbernhard.de

You can also find his plans on kitebuilder.com and also kiteplans.org. Both are excellent sources for kite plans so definitley spend some time looking around those sites, they are full of cool things.

So, we are working on the Clownfish, you can see an english version of the clownfish plan here. Here is the plan drawing.

The plan is for a big inflatable, but i have chosen to make a mere replica of an inflatable at about twenty inches long, so it is going to basically be a windsock.

This plan is the same one used by Premier Kites for their 30 foot long clownfish. You can find it in their catalog, on their Bernhard Dingwert page. Here is a link to Premier's Catalog.

Now it is time to cut the black lines that edge the white stripes on the body of the clown. Suddenly I remember just why I had put this project down. The little black lines are numerous. There are twelve pieces per side, plus two more per side for the mouth for a total of twenty eight little black lines. And tracing the pattern through the black material was simply impossible. And of course had i cut all those little lines with scissors it would have been fray city.

That's when I decided to pull out my soldering iron and give hot cutting a try. At the same time, the new ripstop showed up from kitebuilder.com so i decided to work on the Spike project instead, leaving the fish to flounder on the table. Hot cutting the three quarter ripstop for Spike worked great. The difference in precision after using scissors made fitting things and sewing them together that much more fun and rewarding.

So back to the clown. I took the plan and printed it double size. This meant i had four pieces of paper to tape together. This is how the fish got to be twenty inches long. So now i cut out the little black stripes from the paper plan. Then I outlined them onto some cardstock and cut out the shapes. I was pretty much done with that when i realized that my stripes needed to be a bit longer to make sure they clear the hemline.

You can see the little pices of cut plan and the cardstock templates in this photo:

The parts were all hotcut out of one piece of fabric. Placing paper underneath the fabric allowed the cut parts to stick to the paper keeping everything nice and neat.

In this photo cut parts can be seen with some of the templates still laying in place. You can tell from those templates where I cut free handed at the top and bottom ends of each line to help cover the hemline once they are sewn.

Here's a picture of all the cut parts. This fabric seemed to melt easier than the three quarter ounce fabric so greater care had to be taken to not stall too long while tracing the template or things might get a bit gooey.

The parts peel off the paper with no trouble. This was great because everything could stay stuck in place until it was needed and it made finding and identifying the parts a lot easier.

Sewing on the lines proved to be great fun. I found it was completely possible to make the needle go right along the very edges of the little black stripes. I'm not sure if i'm really that much better, but things sure seem lot easier than they used to.

Kites Flown:

Kites Flown:

iFlite #1261 (orange vented)

iFlite #1239 (orange)

Welcome to Windstock.net

Kite Journal

Wednesday April 24th, 2013

Things Are Coming Along Swimmingly

Kites Flown: