Dancing Frog Kites

We (Jennifer Snyder and Bob Harris) have long been fascinated with kites. As we learn more about kitemaking we will put up photos of our latest kites, along with interesting kite sites we have found on the web.

Dancing Frog kites for sale! See how we made them!

Perhaps the most fun in playing with kites is that I get to do some arts and crafts with Jennifer who is trained in art. She is affectionately known as "Froggy" to our community, and her mark is well known:

"Send a message to Froggy"

At the Dance Palace Summer Day Camp, Jennifer's Kite making class made a Chinese Dragon kite. In the US we call these kites Centipede kites because of the way the body moves and looks in the sky.

Jennifer is very familiar with mushrooms. Jennifer is the author of a cookbook, The Shiitake Way, a vegetarian shiitake mushroom cookbook.

Jennifer creates frog designs and Bob makes the kites.

Jennifer designed a frog which she calls the Dancing Frog^©. We have made over 300 eddy kites with this design, and using computer graphics Jennifer added a drop shadow. Then we made 30 of these eddy kites into an Eddy Arch that Ty Billings of High as a Kite pioneered. The arch is over 200 feet long and won the "Most Incredible Kite" award with Ty and his Dancing Bear arch at the Berkeley Kite festival July 1997.

One weekend when Jennifer was away I made a small (about 18" long) xframe fighter from a design she had created out of paper. We call them "Jumping Frogs".

They fly so well (great for kids and grownups too!) that I went on to make several in a larger size about 40" long, with a hole in the middle. It flies really well in light wind even though I designed it for higher winds.

We have decided to call them "Lightning Frogs" because of the lightning bolt we are painting on the sides of them.

After our trip to Bali (see Bali Kite Festival and Bali Studio), we started working with Balinese artists, creating kites which are a fusion of our designs, and Balinese design work. Below is our Wheel of Life Mandala rokkaku kite. We sent pictures over the internet to Bali and the artists combined the pictures to make this mandala with a frog on the outside of the wheel of life! This traditional Tibetan thangka has within it the 5 elements, and 4 gates. We are in the process of making more mandala and daikini art for the sky.

Our newest kites include more mandala art. We had our artist Agung in Bali create a Buddha frog, combining Northwest Indian art, Tibetan thangka art, and Hindu symbology. Bob then turned it into a Latin American style kite:

For several years now we watched various kite makers such as Ron and Sandy Gibian and Dale Vanderhoof create beautiful long narrow kites, which Dale has dubbed "noodle" kites. These kites fly well in a wide wind range, but no graphic inspired us to create one, until one day Bob came up with the idea to create the Chakras on a noodle. We made two 15' Noodles as a joint venture with Dale Vanderhoof of Black Feather Kites. Jennifer painted the images, Bob sewed the imaged on the kite skin and Dale made the sticks and bridles to finish the kites. The chakras are the spiritual images of the centers in the physical body. They represent:

We have started a kite page for the California artist kitemakers who have taught us so much and we want to share some of their flying art with you. We are showing such kite makers as Dale Vanderhoof, Bobby Stanfield, Ron and Sandy Gibian, Ty Billings and Randy Tom. See their art at the

Visit a few of our favorite kite sites on the web. We hope you enjoy them as much as we do.

Please feel free to email us with any tips or thoughts on kites. I am currently hard at work on dyeing kites, as this technique seems to really open new doors for us. Please email us if you have any tips to share using dyes on synthetics! Send us an email

Dancing Frog Designs^® Kites