End of 2022 - state of the collection

I realised the other day I haven't done an 'end of year - overview of the collection' post since 2018. For the last few years, that was mostly because the growth of the collection has slowed down considerably. And that again is mainly due to there being very few old Peter Powell kites for sale out there that are 'new' to the collection. 

Nevertheless, I thought it was time to do another 'end of year' post again, but slightly different from the previous ones. Rather than showing pictures of those PP kites added this year, I'm posting some graphs showing the growth of the collection over time. If you want to see pictures of any in the collection, they can all be found here. 

First graph shows the number of Peter Powell kites collected over time (in days), since I got my very first PP kite in 2013, nearly 10 years ago. You can clearly see when I got a job lot of PP kites, which really kickstarted the collection. And you can also see the rate of new additions to the collection levelling off, simply because fewer and fewer PP kites available for sale are new to the collection.

In the graph below, I've split the collection in four different groups. Blue squares show the numbers of old Mk I / II kites. Green circles show the US-produced Peter Powell kites; diamonds, deltas as well as quads. Purple triangles show kites from the Caribbean Kite Company. And, finally, red diamonds show the modern Mk III kites. 

At the end of 2022, the overall total is 72. And just for clarity, I consider a stack as one kite as it is flown off one pair of lines (so the Cayman 6-stack counts as one kite), and don't count the 'Duct Tape Stunter', as that one merely uses an old Peter Powell frame. Looking at the breakdown, I guess the CKC part of the collection will always remain the smallest part, as they're really hard to find. And I wouldn't at all be surprised if the number of modern PP kites overtakes that of the US-produced ones; maybe even this coming year already ...