Celebrity kite artist Kathy Goodwind breezes into Sask. kite festival
Kathy Goodwind may have started her professional career in the medical world but things took off for her when she left the lab behind and started making and flying kites.
This weekend, more than 40 years later, Goodwind is a celebrity kite flyer at the Windscape Kite Festival in Swift Current, Sask.
She said her passion for making and flying kites has been carried by the amazing history of kite design, the people she meets and the feeling she gets when the sails take flight.
The power of kite flying
"When you're flying a kite you have a mental moment where everything just turns into peacefulness and I think those times helped me discover more about myself and how driven I am — I never knew that," said Goodwind.
Every year, more than 40 national and international kite performers and designers attend the Swift Current festival.
Goodwind, who is from Seattle, takes her kites all over the world.
She said she will be able to bring more of her favourites to Swift Current because she can transport them in her vehicle.
"For a two-day festival I probably have enough kites to go to a two-week festival," Goodwind told CBC Radio's Saskatchewan Weekend host Shauna Powers.
Goodwind found herself in the kite-building world when she was in between jobs and found work helping out at a kite shop.
Having developed an interest from sorting through bits and pieces at the shop, she started building her own kites.
She was also working part time analyzing blood at a lab, but her interest in medical technology waned as her passion for kite-building grew.
Orders for her kites started flowing in, including one from Pizza Hut, which wanted her to make kites to fly at their restaurants.
Goodwind was a single mom of a teenage boy, who took to sewing at the age of about 14 or 15 and designed numerous kites himself.
Creativity in the skies
Her own developing passion for kites set in motion a career spanning 40 years, during which she sold, designed, flew and manufactured kites.
In 2012 she closed her Seattle kite shop but she still travels to festivals and events around the world.
Having established long-lasting friendships with other kite flyers over the years, Goodwind said she is looking forward to meeting up with her Canadian friends at the festival in Saskatchewan.
She said she is still amazed by the creativity she sees in the skies.
"Not just in our area but in every spot in the world, there's people flying kites," she said.
"It could be just a bird that inspired [the design] or just a leaf falling."
The Windscape Kite Festival runs at Marston Street and 11th Avenue SW in Swift Current from 10 a.m. CST on June 23 to 5 p.m. CST on June 24.
