Make a Homemade Kite

by Jay
(Essex)

Flying kites is a fun family pastime and it can be made into a very rewarding experience if you are flying a homemade kite. When I decided to make kites with my kids, I tried to find things around my house I could use.

Since diamond-shaped kites are some of the easiest to make and fly we decided on making a few of those. You will need some very basic materials to make these kites.

We used:

- Wooden Dowel Rods
- A Large Piece of Strong Paper
- Glue
- Strong Twine

I took the wooden dowel and cut one piece that was 24” and one that was 16.” Then I made a mark in the middle of the shorter rod and a mark a third of the way down one side of the longer rod. (Use a ruler for this. You need to make sure the marks are right.) I added a dab of glue to the marks, placed the rods together at the marks and then bound the crossing tightly with string. This part was a little tricky, so do a couple practice runs without glue if you need to. Now we had the frame of our homemade kite.

Using a utility knife, I then cut a notch into the ends of the rods. This held the string that I ran around the outside of the kite to help it hold its shape. Make sure this string is nice and tight and then tie the ends together.

While I was doing this part, my kids were creating cool patterns with markers and glitter decorating the pieces of paper that they were going to use on their kites.

Lay the frame down on the large piece of paper and cut around it, leaving a little less than an inch extra. Smear this extra paper with glue and fold it over so that it sticks to both the string and itself.

Then you can place a piece of string running from each end of both dowels, leaving a little slack it in. This gives you somewhere to tie the long kite string to. To finish off our homemade kites, we used some caution tape we had lying in the garage for the tail streamers.

My kids love running around trying to make their kites fly and it was a cheap way to amuse them for hours.