Nick, I’m in no way a kite making expert. I’m self taught by using books and youtube videos.
It is, however, very easy to make an eddy kite or what is traditionally seen as a kite shape. The next most common is the delta shape, which you’ve seen sold in Walmart and hobby shops.
To make a nice kite requires sophisticated materials (rods, clasps, hooks and connectors), which can be bought at a kite store as well as durable fabric or kite sail materials. Then depending upon the materials you have to sew the kite together so that it can be assembled and then disassembled.
Having said all of this, we could make Tyvek kits in the Eddy or several other shapes, use wood we cut in the woodshop for a frame and glue them up pretty easily. It wouldn’t take more than about 90 minutes or so. This is a very simple but functional kite. Even kids can make them easily.
Here’s a PDF describing some “garbage bag” type kites in several different configurations. You can use a multitude of other materials do build the same kind of kites. Box kites are easy to make, too.
mbk-simplest-dowel-kites.pdf (1.4 MB)
On the other hand if we wanted to tackle a more interesting kite we could 3-d print some of the connectors and sew up one from rip stop or maybe some of the silk mentioned in this thread (no pun intended). This would take much more time and effort. This one is called a Delta Coyne kite.
My problem is time. I have a lot of irons in the fire right now.