How to Make a Woven Paper Kite Part 1

This colorful kite here is what we’re going to making next. To put this together, to actually make it, you’re going to need the following materials. You’re going to need some construction paper, 12 x 18 inches is good, some glue stick, some scraps of fabric for the tail of the kite, a stapler, ruler and pencil, because we’ve got a lot of measuring to do, we’ve got a lot of cutting to do and you’re going to need some yarn for the tail. So, what I’m going to do is I’m going to go ahead and start to put this kite together. First thing, you’re going to need to choose a color scheme. I would suggest limiting your colors to three. And I’ve gone ahead and I’ve already chosen my three colors, yellow, black, and orange. And you need two of each of those colors. Okay! That’s going to give you a plenty of options with the decorating of the strips. And I’m going to start with a black sheet. And this is going to be my loom, okay! Because we’re going to be doing weaving and first we need to make a loom which becomes the wharf strips and then the strips that we cut and decorate that you actually weave through the loom are the waft. And we’ll be talking more about that as we worked are way through the project. But the first thing you need to do is fold that piece of paper that’s going to become your wharf, you’re going to fold it in half. All right, and then you’re going to put the open end away from you. The folded end should be down towards your body and you’re just going to lay the length of your ruler across the top edge of your piece of paper and you’re going to draw a line along the edge of the ruler. That’s what I call my stop line. Okay! And you’ll understand that in a few moments. Okay! Then, I’m going to find the halfway mark on my folded edge down here and I’m just going to cut a little notch here. Okay! Then, I’m going to find the half way point between that cut and I’m going to put another notch there, okay. Then, I’m going to do the same thing on this side. Then, I’m going to back to my center one and I’m going to try and cut as straight as I can right up to that stop line. Then, I’ll do the same thing on this one, try and cut straight up to my stop line. It doesn’t have to be perfect if they’re little crooked, it’s all right, it’s not that big deal. So right now, I’ve got four big sections and my goal here is to cut these into halves again, so that we end up with eight sections here, okay. And I thought just for the fun of it, I’ve got—if you have pair of these funny scissors that cut the funny edges, you can ahead and use those. And we’re going to cut these sections in half. Then, we’re going to open up your loom, and then back the crease a little bit and we’re actually going to set this aside, because now we’re going to take the other two colors, I’m going to take my yellow and orange, and I’m going to measure these so that I have one inch wide strips. So you’re going to need to do a little measuring here. And in order to get one-inch strips, what we need to do lay the ruler down, across the top, be sure you lined up the edge of your ruler with the edge of your paper and where the inch marks are is where you’re going to put your little line. Okay now, for those of you who aren’t really familiar with rulers, the inch mark is actually—it’s the longest line up opposite the number, okay! Then I’m going to go all the way across the top, then I’m bring my ruler down to the bottom of the page and line up the edge of my ruler with the edge of my paper and I’m going to do the same thing again in my inch’s mark or right opposite the longest line and the darkest line, right opposite the numbers on the ruler. Okay! Now, you’re going to turn paper so that you can actually lay your ruler down and line up those marks. Then you’re going to draw a line that connects these two dash marks that you’ve made. And you have to do this all the way down. Okay! These strips I’m cutting here is what we called the waft. Okay! Those are the strips that are going to be used to actually weave across your loom. And we’re going to some fancy decorating with different size strips on our waft strips and we’re actually going to decorate the wharf also. So that you got lots of different colors just like we did on this kite here, okay! So we’ll be layering different size strips, one on top of the other and gluing them in place. So now, I’ve got this line drawn and to make things go a little bit quicker, so you don’t have to cut so many, I’m putting my two colors together. All right! The only trick is, you going to hold on so that they don’t move while you’re cutting. So I’m going to go ahead in a minute, cut my yellow and orange strips out. I’m going to go ahead and finish cutting all this out, and then the next step is going to be—to do the measuring for the next size strips. The next size strips are going to be half inch and then we’re going to even go down to quarter inch strips. Okay, here are an inch strips. Set those aside and now I’m going to go ahead and I’m going to measure our half inch strips. And it’s the same process we did before except for using the half-inch marks all the way across. And you’ll notice I have all three colors this time. Then, I’m going to start at top, lay down my ruler, same thing, got to find those half inch marks. Okay, you going to have the longest marks opposite the numbers and then right in between those, there’s a line that’s the next longest—that’s your half-inch mark. And then we’re going to line this up just like we did with inches, draw a line across. I’m just about finished lining this up. And then I’m going to go ahead and cut them all out again just like I did the one inch ones, okay! And then, we’re going to ahead and start gluing this in place. Now, I told you earlier on that you’re going to have quarter inch once but you need to worry with those yet. Okay, because those are going to from this half inch ones that we’re cutting. And all we do is cut those in half lengthwise when we need them. Okay! So basically, we’re just going to work with our one inch strips and our half inch strips to start with. I actually have some strips that are already cut, so we can go ahead and start to do our assembling, okay! Now, we’re going to go ahead and we’re going to decorate our wharf first. And what I’m going to is I’m going to use this half inch strips here. I’m just going to put the glue right on the wharf right down the center. And then lay this on the top. And what I want to do is alternate my colors. All right! We’ve just finished the decorating our loom, the wharf strips. And what I want to do is work on the waft strips. Okay! Now, you’re going to need eight of each color because we’ve already taken off about an inch up here, then inch up here and this is eighteen, so I’m thinking we need to decorate eight of each color. So I’m going to count out eight of each color. So just so you know ahead of time. Every strip you’ve cut isn’t necessarily going to be used. Okay! Now, what we’re going to do is we’re going to alternate colors on the orange strips. On the one inch orange strips, we’re going to put a half inch yellow strip. Okay, and then on the yellow strips, we’re going to put a half inch orange strip, okay. And we’re going to do this on all 16 of our waft strips. Okay! So I’m going to go ahead, same thing I did on the wharf, I’m going to put the glue down at the center lengthwise and just lay that on top of it. And you just want to alternate putting the opposite color on top. We’ve just finished decorating all the wharf strips and what we’re going to do next is you’re going to take some of this half inch black ones that you didn’t use. Okay! And we are going to cut those in half lengthwise. Then this may take a little bit of concentration on your part. Remember they don’t have to be perfect, because like I told, the overall effect of the weaving is still good weather they’re perfect or not. And then what we’re going to is we’re going to lay these black strips on top of these and glue this in place, okay! Now, if you want a little bit a variety, okay. You can cut some of your orange ones in half lengthwise and some of your yellow ones and half lengthwise. And what you can do is with the thin strips, you can create like a little pattern, like you could do yellow, orange, black, yellow, orange, black, you know, or you can do them all black if you want. It really doesn’t matter. That’s totally up to you. You could another orange one on top of the yellow one. I’ll go ahead and cut out a yellow one, so you can see. But you’ve got all this half inch strips here that you’re going to cut in half which just going to make them quarter inch strips and you can go and you put a yellow one on top of the orange one, like this. So you’ve got different ways to put that final thin strip on this. I set that out. So you’ve got this and then you’ve got a black which gives you the most contrast. Okay so, that’s what we’re going to do next. And I’m going to go ahead and glue this in place and finish decorating all of our wharf strips. Now, I’m going to go ahead and start to decorate the wharf or what we call—well actually that’s the loom. These are the wharf strips and the whole thing is called the loom. So, I’m going to alternate again between putting those quarter inch strips down, then I alternate between you know the orange, the yellow, and the black. So I’ll go ahead and start gluing these in place. Okay, there we go! That loom is decorated. And we’re going to go ahead and start to do the weaving portion. Now, we need to waft strips and you may want to decide to put on, you know, in and some kind of special order. You know, so you create another pattern or you can just put them in anyway it really doesn’t matter. It’s totally up to you. When you weave, remember you have to go over one under, over one, under one as your pattern. Okay, I went under, over, under, over, under, over, under, over. The next strip, I have to do the opposite, so I started on this one by going under, so I have to start by going over the first one. And then lift up my second one go underneath it. Okay! So you just have to be careful not to lose that pattern. Okay! And then the other thing you want do is make certain that you’re pushing the strips up so they actually touch each other. I want to do a yellow one next. Now, this one started by going over, so I have to start by going under. Just be careful try not tear your loom because it is after all just made out of paper. Then I’m going to go back to my black one. And you really want to make certain that each strip touches the strip before it. So you really get this kind of square-rectangle pattern going because that’s the neat part of that weaving. Now, what I’m going to do next is I’m going to trim off this excess here on my waft strips because we don’t need all that extra, and don’t trim too close because anyone will have enough to fold over onto the back. Okay, and to hold the kite—to hold all your pieces in place, what I’m going to do is I’m going to lift up each waft strip on the front side, then I’m going to put some glue underneath it and just push it down into the glue, so that the ends don’t come unraveled when we actually make the shape of the kite out of the weaving. Okay, so you’re going to go up the other side. Now, easy way to get the other side, is to turn this over and you’re going to lift up these. Same thing we just did on the front side. And we have to two left. And then we flip it back and make sure everything is snuggly glued there. Now, fold it, turn it back over so it’s—you know, so all your pretty part is faced down. And then you’re going to fold these and what you want to do is kind to fold them just to the edge of your loom. Okay! I leave just like maybe a sixteenth of an inch or so, and you’re going to fold over all these tabs. Just fold on so that that makes an even edge like this. And then we’ll come back and we’ll glue them flat. Okay, I’m almost finished here, two left. I want to make sure that everything is laying flat at this point. Now, what we’re going to do is we’re going to fold it so that we get our kite shape and then the very last thing we’ll do is we’ll make our little tail for the kite. So, what I’m going to do is try and find the center point which actually I found it when I cut my first cut. So that will help me a lot. And kites usually are shaped—they’re longer at the bottom part and shorter at the top. Okay, so that’s what I’m going to try and do with my fold. So since I have these strips going across here, I think I’ll try and line it up with this orange here, like that, this strip right here, opposite it because that’s going to help me a lot, and then bring it in. Okay, so we’ve got that part. Then our other center point is down here and we’re going to fold this over and we have to line it up with this and the same thing. It’s almost like making an ice cream cone. So I’m going to fold this part up here and then I want to crease up here and then you’re lining them up. Then, I’ll get a little glue on here. And now, this is where our stapler comes in and put my stapler inside here. Okay! I just slid it in it’s like a little pocket or little envelope, and I’m going to staple the bottom part of my kite together. And then up at the top, I’m just going to pull together a little bit at the top so it gives you that kind of bent rounded part that a kite has because that’s how it catches the air when it actually flies. Although these aren’t going to be flown, these are more decorative kites. So, I’m going to overlap those and staple them, so now, we’ve got that bent look of the kite, okay. And then the next thing we’re going to do is make our tail. So I’ve got some pieces of yarn here. And I’m thinking, I want to our kind of stay with my color scheme, so I’m going to take the yellow and orange portion here and part of the red. We’ll tie these together in a little knot. And I have some fabric scraps here and I want to kind stick with the color scheme of the black, orange and yellow. You may not always be able to do that but at least if I have something with the black background or maybe some black and pulled in a little bit of the yellow here. We’re going to tie them around the center, like that. Okay, there we go. And then, all we have left to do—actually there are two things left to do. Okay one, I want to go back here on my kite. And just kind of put some glue in there. Now, if you have hot glue gun, you’re going to want to squirt some glue in here, right in this little opening here, and then you can lay the piece of the yarn right in the glue and press it closed. Give it a few seconds to set up. And there we have our kite. Enjoy!