Squadron kites

Bamboo for mini kites can be shaved from anything, but what the instructor was using was a wok-scrubbing brush. He’d cut off a bristle, shave it down to the tiniest slivers, um, shave them down some more, and maybe massage their bend. He used magnifying goggles & a box cutter. (The box cutter was common, from their local hardware chain, but its blade didn’t wiggle side to side like the cheap Home Depot ones do.)

The 6th grade teacher giving the Korean fighter -making class used a lot of window blinds. Roman window blinds — the kind that looks like a placemat, with a lot of slats or sticks connected by a weave of string — are apparently great resources. He cuts the entire blind to the desired length and then just pulls out the sticks. He mostly used round-stick blinds, which provided sticks longer and maybe thinner than bamboo skewers, but also used used flat-stick blinds for a horizontal spar.