John and Debbie's Kite Bag

My first kiting memory is a summer children's workshop at Aberystwyth Arts Centre, where we were taught to make and decorate simple sled kites made from bin liners and garden cane. Everything went very well until we went out and tried to fly the kites in the small field outside the building. The field was surrounded by trees on three sides, and the Arts Centre building on the other. Nobody could launch a kite there.

I can't remember why I decided to buy the cheap "Penguin Party" delta kite from Woolworths in 1997, when we lived in Northfield. It might have been because we'd got into the habit of going up to Beacon Hill, a local beauty spot, and seen other people flying kites. We bought a few small single line kites during that period. At the time I felt that dual line kites were a little showy and vulgar; that single line kites were the calm trancendental Yin to the steerable kite's ostentatious Yang.

When we moved from Birmingham to Leamington, we lost interest in kites for a while.

Then towards the end of last year, our friends Mark and Sarah came to visit, and they brought along their new Flexifoil Stacker 6. I'd heard of power kites; I'd seen the kitesurfers in Leigh on Solent -- but I'd never flown one before and it was fun! As luck would have it, a more local friend, Tom, got bitten by the power kite bug at around the same time, and I was soon trying out his stacked 6 foot and 8 foot Flexis, which drove to to buy my own 8 footer.

A subscription to the rec.kites newsgroup, a weekend at the Fylde kite festival, and several impulsive kite purchases later, I reckon there's a kite in the bag for pretty much any occasion. A lot of my kiting friends reallydon't see the attraction of all those single line kites, still.

Penguin Party is now dead, torn apart by too strong a wind.

Single Line Kites

Basic Box Kite

I think I bought this in a toy shop in Northfield, Birmingham when we used to live there.

Fancy Box Kite

I think this one's from Northfield too. I thought it was quite exotic at the time. It is rather classy...

Cellular

This one is from one of the stallholders at the Fylde Kite Festival 2002. It's a fiddle to put together, but it's very pretty in the air.

Sled

This one is from South Africa in 1997. I think it was just in a newsagents or something similar. It's just polythene, and it cost pence, but it flies incredibly easily, has a large sail area and a striking pattern. The line it came with was really shoddy though; I don't use that line any more.

Star

I can't remember how we discovered it, but we drove out of our way to find a kite factory near Durban, South Africa. They were quite surprised to get visitors, and I don't think they were used to making direct sales.

This is a tumbling kite. Once you've got it flying on a nice long line, bring in a load of line, leaving it in a pile at your feet. Let the line slip through your hands, and as the kite takes up the slack, it will tumble gently downwards. Before it lands, pull the line tight again, and the kite will recover from its tumble and fly skywards.

One of the dowels is broken, I need to fix it.

I'd better explain the image quality (or lack thereof). This picture has been through a lot -- it was taken on a beach near Durban using a point and shoot camera, then developed at an overnight photo development shop by a South African who constantly criticised our photography skills and choice of film. When we got home we got the negatives transferred to PhotoCD at Boots. In the original framing the kite and I take up very little of the frame, so this is a cropped version and the grain of the film is beginning to show. JPEG compression to suit the computers I had access to in 1997 doesn't help either.

Usually if you use the "Oil Painting" filter in paint programs, you end up with something irredeemably naff. I did a swirl distort followed by an oil painting effect on this image, and I think it looks so great, I had a 30"x40" blow up made and put it on my living room wall. It looks like this (only bigger; scale helps a lot)

Ship

I bought this as a gift for Debbie at the 2002 Glastonbury Festival. It's terribly grand, but it needs a pretty stiff breeze to fly.

Mickey Mouse Pocket Kite

I bought this in Lyme Regis in 2001 on the occasion of Dan's birthday. I bought it because being a seaside town, the gift shops had lots of "toy" kites for sale, and I suddenly felt the urgent need to fly one. It was nearing time to go home on the Sunday afternoon, so the window of flying opportunity was short. I tried to fly it on the beach by the harbour. Harbours are well known for being sheltered from the wind.

It has been flown since, in Stevenage. And then I gave it to Tracy's daughter Chelsea, because I am a soft touch.

Tiny Pocket Kite

I'm really not sure where this came from. Maybe it came from the Natural World shop in Birmingham. It's rather good in that the whole thing, kite, line and winder, fits into a little pouch you could hide in your fist.

Sutton FlowForm

This might be our biggest kite. It's certainly our biggest single line kite. We bought it from Gasworks Kite Shop in Seattle. I have ambitions to hang a camera from it at some point.

Triplane

Fish Rokkaku

Dual Line

Flexifoil Proteam 8

Our foray into power kiting. I bought this from Selly Oak Juggling, Birmingham (it looks like they're currently trying to rebrand themselves from a juggling/magic shop which happens to stock kites, into a "Juggling and Kite Shop").

I decided to buy this after having a go first at Mark and Sarah's 6 foot Flexifoil, then at Tom's 6 footer and 8 footer stacked. I couldn't really consider the option of other types of power kite since part of the fun is the ability to stack with those people's kites.

I've been out with Tom a few times flying a 6+8+8 stack of his kites and mine combined, and at times it's genuinely terrifying. The only problem is that my poor arms can barely take the strain, and I'm a wreck after five minutes at the controls. I've seen pictures of really quite tubby men merrily lifting themselves up on these things, that's like doing a half pull-up! These fitness freaks!

Beetle 2100

Highwaymen Diamond Stunter

This is another one Debbie chose. I bought it at the Fylde Kite Festival 2002. It was Sunday and we'd just watched England draw against Sweden in their first game of the World Cup. The kite festival was trying to proceed in spite of torrential rain, but few but the organisers felt much like hanging around. We went to look at the traders' stalls to pass the time and see if the weather would pass, and ended up buying this and the cellular kite described above. The weather showed no sign of improving, so we gave up and left. Fortunately that long weekend we also went to my parents' and we got to have a good fly in Ynyslas.

It came ready to fly with really, really long lines. You don't want to crash it because you've got a 100m walk to get it airborne again. With the tail attached it's very pretty, and with the long lines and the low speed you can do really big figures. I hadn't flown any dual line kites apart from the Flexifoil for years, so on my first flight of this one it was a real shock to the system to find out what tiny movements were needed. I like to make it tumble by rapidly pushing and pulling the handles alternately; the tail traces out the route of the tumble, then you can recover before hitting the ground.