Despite the fact that it’s the middle of spring, the girlfriend and I could find no kites wherever we looked. So we decided to just build our own.
It was actually quite simple to do, too! A few wooden dowels, and nylon crochet yarnish whatever it’s called, some duct tape, and a trashbag (with the yellow drawstring). I taped one three foot dowel to one two foot down in a cross shape, and then framed them with the remaining dowels, making sure to reinforce with extra duct tape.
Then the garbage bag was cut up and put over the frame. The nylon string was attached to the four corners of the kite, and taped down to prevent them from coming untied. The yellow drawstring was then taped to the end of the kite to make for a nice ribbon tail.
I haven’t flown it yet, because it was rainy today. Tommorow is supposed to be clear, though, and have some good wind, so here’s hoping!
So post your stories about kite building, kite flying, or just complain about me buying my supplies at Walmart and feeding money to the corporate monster!
Cool! I always loved kite flying and every year I vow that this year I’m gonna go. I even priced some monster kites off of eBay. In the end, though, I didn’t follow through again.
Enjoy! 
I did that once, I used big lawn leaf bags, wooden rods, and duct tape. For string, I used 100 pound test dacrom fishing line. The reel was a Penn 6/0 Long Beach. I was amazed at the lift the darn thing had - no matter how much I tightened the drag, the kite kept taking more line. It was awesome.
One of my favorite memories involving my dad is when he made my sister and me a kite out of some dowels, some string, and some brown kraft paper (the kind you used to wrap packages in.) There was even a tail made with rags tied onto a string, just like in pictures of kites.
We used that thing for a couple of summers. I initially was skeptical that it would fly at all, being so much heavier than the plastic kites that came from the store. But, while it was a lot harder to get it into the air, that made it all the more satisfying when it was aloft. And that thing lasted us two summers, I think, which was much longer than the plastic ones.
Five years ago I spent ~$150 on a big ass nylon box kite.
Still haven’t flown it 
Well, I got to test the kite out today. At first, it flew like a penguin. We were going to leave the park in a huff, but discovered quickly that my girlfriend had locked her keys in the car. So, we hung out at the park a bit longer…desperately trying to get it to fly. Finally, her roomate arrived with her spare keys and off to Toys R Us we went, in search of a better kite.
Luckily they had some. Unluckily there were only four to choose from. One in the shape of Darth Vader’s helmet, one a more traditional kite design with Batman on it, and two weird looking ones with race cars on them. We chose Batman.
Brought it back to the park, and flew it succesfully for about an hour, and looked at the design. Went back to her apartment, got the scissors and a new trashbag, redesigned the kite a little, made it lighter, etc. We took it outside and ran with it a little in the light winds. It flew for real this time, and flew quite well. Tommorow’s supposed to be windy again, so we’re looking forward to both flying a kit at the same time.