Kite Stories Page

I posted my Kite Stories page kit yesterday, so today I thought I'd show you the page I completed with the kit. 

And since I used twine on this project I'm double dipping and using this page for my own On a Roll post for this Monday. As an aside, I came across a Twinery blog hop, and if you're looking for twine inspiration, take a hop through those posts. Such great ideas! 

First, about the kit name: Kite flying is a simple pleasure, right? Reminds you of summer, childhood, breezy days with lemonade?  Well, after I volunteered for this kit, I realized that my own kite memories could only be described as misadventures. So I decided to do a mostly journaling-only page to document those stories, hence the name Kite Stories.

I cheated twice - I added twine and the Reminisce alpha ("kite").  Everything else

And since the journaling is too hard to read in pictures, here are the stories I told:

A few years ago we were at the Outer Banks and went to the beach to fly kites. For those that don’t know, the Outer Banks is a windy place…..it was good enough for the Wright Brothers , so surely it’s great for a few kites, right? We were on the beach in the surf just before a storm with a couple of dollar-store kites, so that wind was pulling the lines all over the place. I was afraid to let go, worried it would plumet to the earth and stab someone in the chest on the way down (too dramatic? Sorry, I worry!). And in an effort to keep track of her kite and stay with it, Crystal suddenly found herself in chest-deep water with waves rolling in, and I was trailing along with a camera.  At one point I thought we might be the first people to ever drown by kite flying*. We came out of it, but the story is legendary with a couple of friends who were there. (*For the record, I googled “death while kite flying” and found this article. Not funny, be careful out there. But, I didn't actually find any other situations where someone walked right into the water and became so unaware of her surroundings that she nearly drowned. Probably because she wouldn't want to admit it).

It took a couple of years to recover, but in 2008, the idea of kites again entered our brains. Crystal and I were driving home from a big grocery trip. We had a large amount of frozen or refrigerated food, so we needed to get everything unloaded. As we turned the corner into our development, we passed the open green space in the center of our neighborhood and noticed how sunny but windy it was. “Wow, it’s such a nice day, after we unload the groceries we should get the beach kites and come out here and fly them.”  I mean, it was really beautiful, like a laundry detergent commercial. You know the ones - the sun beaming down onto perfectly pinned sheets and shirts that are gently flapping in the breeze while the family picnics in the background, and you can practically feel the serenity......

Blissfully unaware, we got home, unloaded, and then watched as it turned from “fly a kite breezy” into weather that can only be described as “hurricany,” and we kept wondering if our few months of homeownership were going to end that evening in a pile of boards and shingles.  And then we were soon without power for a few days. That meant reloading all those groceries a few hours later and taking them an hour east to Crystal’s family members' freezers. And we had to scour the city for ice (not many stores had power, either) and cook some remaining food outside on the propane grill. And I won't fully go into this tangent story, but some key phrases that might appear in the story......"Naked Guy," "neighbor robbed," "police helicopter, and "and then we were nearly shot by snipers" - all because of a little wind.  Now whenever a storm is rolling in, one of us always asks the other, “Want to fly a kite?”

So those are my kite stories. Not necessarily something I would call a good luck charm around here, but I’ve worked with it, and I hope my kit doesn’t bring bad weather or potential injury to anyone involved.  And to offset the doom and gloom of my kite stories, check out my Kite Pinterest Board for much more happy, inspirational images collected for this topic!