Bargello Noodle

I attended the Fort Worden Kitemakers Conference in March 2001 and this is the result of the workshop taught by John Freeman.

Bargello is a quilting technique, but it also lends itself well to making beautiful kites. It requires a good deal of sewing but the results are quite striking; also, it is very efficient in the use of material, producing almost no cutoffs.

John specializes in Bargello. The Bargello Butterfly is another one of John's designs (Fort Worden 2002).

The Noodle is a typical low-aspect Edo type kite (also known as LoDo), which have some very nice characteristics:

• low drag
• worry-free flying over a wide wind range
• simple transportation and assembly

(9K)

The cascaded bridle looks a bit daunting, but is really quite simple once you have grasped the principle. It is a dynamic bridle, i.e. the sub-bridles are connected by rings and they adjust to the wind pressure in flight. Tuning is thus reduced to finding the correct tow point - the sub-bridles never have to be manually adjusted.