“Do you have those colourful crepe paper rolls?”
“Sure, how many do you need?”
“All of them!”
This dialogue was repeated in all six discount stores we visited. We robbed four Chinese shops of every spool of thread they had. The people at Bauhaus probably thought we were building a hotel after seeing all the bamboo roll shades we bought. It took a print company two hours to cut all our paper into neat little squares.
Little did they know all this stuff was going to end up in the sky.
Saturday morning came; our car was filled to the brim with white paper, colourful blotting paper, bamboo roll shades, spools of thread and masking tape. All this took up so much space that we barely had room for three people, Masters of Disaster, Lords of Chaos and kite workshop aficionados. The princess of Taka-Tuka called us, and we were ready to roll.
On to Velenje!
In one of those delightful quirks of history, the great Astrid Lindgren somehow became friends with Marjan Marinšek, the managing director of the Cultural Centre in Velenje. Back in the eighties, she visited this town in the northeast of Slovenia, and she brought an unruly, indomitable, super-imaginative, super-strong and super-kind child with her: Pippi Långstrump, also known as Pippi Longstocking, or Pika Nogavička in Slovene.
Pippi, very much in line with her character, simply refused to leave Velenje, and so every year since 1990 the princess of Taka-Tuka Island becomes the Mayoress of Velenje for a week: a playful, crazy, chaotic week of one of the greatest festivals for kids ever, Pika’s Festival Velenje.
We were lucky enough to be part of this festival in 2025 and were delighted to be invited again this year. Our job: to colour the sky of Velenje over the weekend; four kite workshops for kids, two on Saturday and two on Sunday.
But our kite workshops are not peaceful, orderly and cosy affairs, with some 20, max 30 kids wielding crayons, scissors and tape while the real kite workshop masters supervise them, gently nudging the little ones through the more difficult parts of making a kite. Oh, no.
It’s chaos time!
“Wanna make a kite, little girl?”
“Ummm … yes.”
“Sit down and let’s go!”
Gregor is always so nervous before the workshops start. The tables are set, the kite-making stuff is ready, the volunteers prepared for action.
“But what if no customers come?”
And it’s always the same. A little girl arrives, shyly asks if this is the kite workshop, sits at the table and makes the first kite of the day. Then she runs away, the kite rising high behind her, its colourful tails glittering in the sun.
A perfect advertisement for the workshop.
Then two kids approach us, and two more, and then eight, sixteen … sixty …
We told the volunteers (incidentally, they were the best crew ever, and if the organisers of the festival read this: GIVE THEM A BONUS!) that it would get rough soon, but they couldn’t possibly imagine the utter mess that would overwhelm the place within minutes.
Our kite workshop is not really a workshop. It’s a never-ending, steamrolling, screaming disaster of kids, parents, paper, sticks, kids, tails, tape and thread barrelling through the day to a heavy metal soundtrack.
And every minute, a kid with a kite darts off.
“I’m gonna piss on your plan … Mwahahahaha!”
– the rain
Part of our job at Pika’s Festival was showing off our big kites, so two of us left the chaos and went up the hill overlooking the festival area to lift the real monsters.
Velenje lies in a basin surrounded by mountains, so it is, hm, eolically challenged, but that day there was wind, and the first trilobite went up smoothly among gasps and screams of joy.
Then the wind picked up, the second trilobite started to dance a bit erratically, but we simply had to unfurl our flag kite, the Giant Proteus, and suddenly the kids watching a play down there stopped paying attention to the funny guys on the stage.
“Look, Mum! What is that!?”
It was a huge, 25-metre-long Proteus anguinus, the human fish. All the kids in Slovenia know this endemic animal that lives in caves, and now it was flying menacingly above them, enormous and magnificent.
“Hey, grab the line and try flying it!”
“Ooooooo, how heavy it is!”
The kids up on the hill were completely fascinated with the flying monster – especially since their little kites were mingling in the sky with the giants! – lining up to try their hand at being kite pilots. But the wind was getting stronger and stronger, and clouds appeared on the horizon that looked seriously wrong.
A glance at the weather radar confirmed our biggest fears: a storm was coming.
We had to pull the kites down quickly, and with 50 kids helping, pulling and laughing their asses off, we did it in no time.
The first drops fell. The big kites were safe, but the workshop was in serious danger of getting all the paper wet, so we ran down and hurriedly took all the stuff into the tents, and then the skies opened.
The first quarter of our kite workshop was over. The second was in danger of being cancelled.
“Unfortunatelly, all outdoor activities are cancelled due to rain.”
– the festival organisers at 3 PM
Our big plan was for the kids to make a thousand kites over two days. With two sessions per day, four hours in the morning and four in the afternoon, we needed them to make some 250 kites per session in order to reach the goal. We were well on track, with almost three hundred kites already flying, but now an entire afternoon session was off.
Well, it’s pointless to argue with the weather. We waved our great plan goodbye and went to the place we had booked for the night to unwind and relax.
It was a 20 minutes drive through the Šaleška Valley and up into the hills to the village of Gabrke, where the Country House Apat awaited us (link is in Slovene, but you can (and absolutely should, if you find yourselves in the area) find them on Booking.com).
“Woof woof wooof! Woof mmph rrrrr. Woof hmmm.”
– Pak the Dog
Apat is a large and serious farm, managed by Peter. Laura takes care of the guests, who have a beautiful little house in the woods (a veritable Villa Villekulla!) at their disposal, with comfy rooms and all the amenities one could wish for.
But the real boss of Apat Farm is Pak.
Pak is a rather large black-and-white dog, and the sweetest one we’ve ever met. He greets the guests, shows them around and watches over them. He protected us through the night, especially against the neighbours’ dog, with whom he apparently has some unfinished business, sleeping faithfully in front of the doors.
When we woke up, Pak rose and alerted everyone around with his woofs that my guys are out, better stay away – or else! And then Laura came with the most exquisite breakfast … homemade yoghurt, raspberry jam, chestnut honey, bacon jam and assorted meat goodies, and sublime freshly baked bread … with this divine view to top it all.
We really wanted to stay, but another day of kite workshops was waiting. We said goodbye to Pak, who seemed a bit sad about it, and drove down to Velenje, to Pika’s Festival Sunday.
There was more chaos to instigate!
“What are they doing? Eating the stuff?”
– Ivor demolishing the fourth bamboo roll shade
It was the second day of the workshop, so word had got around, and tons of kids and their parents were already waiting for us. There was no delay. The total mess got off to a full-speed start from the very beginning.
Workshops for kids, right … In our total chaos, with children as young as four, neither we nor the volunteers can do much. Parents are essential; they help, they guide and, in the end, they sometimes make the kite themselves.
Except, of course, if one of our workshop helpers drove to Velenje on his Harley-Davidson, dressed in a black vest showing off his heavily tattooed arms, sporting a menacing beard and having a very dismissive attitude towards whining: help me, help, I can’t do that, you do it.
NO, he thundered. YOU will do it.
And the kid did it.
Here and there, we hear criticism: what is this workshop even worth for kids when the parents do everything? But that completely misses the point.
The point is that a parent and a child make a kite together. Even if the kid merely holds the tape with their little fingers, clumsily breaks the bamboo sticks in half, or tries in vain to find the start of the thread while Mum and Dad do all the rest, it’s still high-quality time spent together. Real bonding, even if only for fifteen minutes.
The priceless reward comes at the end, when the kite is finished: the kid grabs the spool and runs, the kite flies into the sky … and their eyes literally light up. “It flies, it flies! We made it, Dad! Mum, look how beautiful it is!”
And one more thing: in our kite workshop, the little ones probably make their first serious, really important life decision:
what colours the tails of their kite will be.
“Let’s take some coffees to go, they will wait for us.”
“Yeah – or the crowds will overwhelm them, hahaha.”
“Hahaha … Oh. My. God.”
We were five minutes late returning from lunch. Surely the volunteers would be able to keep the crowds out for a moment … Or would they?
They couldn’t. The assault on the kite workshop was too large; their ranks broke, kids and parents got their greedy hands on the paper, the tape, the tails and the sticks, and the utter kite chaos went on.
We downed the coffee in one gulp and jumped in.
“Good you are here … The sticks will be gone in 5 minutes!”
Ivor went and took apart our last bamboo roll.
The fifth one.
“The tails! We are all out of tails!”
Saša went and started cutting the rolls of crepe paper, seemingly in vain, as the kids were pulling them out of the box faster than he could cut new ones.
A couple of minutes later, we had to open the secret stash of tape.
And the secret stash of spools of thread.
We glanced at the clock. Would we get through?
At half past seven, we first reduced and then stopped the incoming traffic (yes, that move made a couple of kids cry).
At seven, the last kite took off into the blue evening sky.
On the ground lay the remains of the workshop: a couple of tails, some sticks, a bag of bobbins and two almost-finished rolls of tape.
Five completely exhausted volunteers.
And us, pretty much unable to move.
The chaos was finally over.
“Let’s grab a cold one, we’re buying.”
We all deserved it.
Because that weekend more than a thousand kites were flying over Velenje
1.100, to be precise.
“Did you make a kite?”
“Well, you see, there was an hour’s wait just to get to the table!”
“Ah, alright …”
“But it was totally worth it!”
We all got more than we gave. The kite workshops at the 37th Pika’s Festival were such an amazing experience. The chaos, the rain, the crowds, the flying Proteus, the little kites fluttering … The kids’ eyes gleaming with joy.
Thank you, Velenje.
Thank you, Festival Velenje, Pika’s Festival, the Embassy of Sweden in Slovenia, all the sponsors and supporters.
Thank you, Barbara, Klavdija and the organising crew who made yet another fantastic festival.
Thank you, volunteers, we couldn’t have done it without you. You were the best crew ever, and again, if the organisers of the festival read this: GIVE THEM A BONUS!!!
Thank you, Pak, Peter and Laura of Country House Apat.
And thank you, Astrid and Pippi.
Srečno, Velenje! ⚒️ 🪁 … See you next year!
P.S
Certain photos were brazenly stolen from the fantastic official photographers of the festival, Ksenija Mikor and Staš Gregorič.
I remember my first kite, it became a passion for years.
Hope it still is! 😉