Thursday, February 9, 2012

How to make feathers, or a gorgeous leaf.. using a paper napkin

I saw a beautiful feather on Pinterest someone made, without a tutorial so I  came up with a few ideas of my own.
This one is using a paper napkin (mardi gras napkins from the dollar store) glue, brush and copper jewlers wire (we all have this stuff!) and scissors. This wire is good to use because when it is done you can bend the feather, and you can trim it easily with a scissor if need be.

Here is what I did.. I cut a small piece of (1 ply) napkin and with a tiny bit of glue, and dry fingers, wrapped it around the end of a 6" piece of wire to make the quill.
Next I cut two longer rectangles, the length of the wire minus the already wrapped end. I placed the wire down the center of one of the rectangles, and ever so gently brushed elmers glue on both sides of the wire.  I then laid the second piece of napkin on top, making a wire sandwich, and smoothed it gently. Allow it to dry for several minutes.
After it dries you can trim away the sides into a leaf or a thinner feather shape. You can make a more complicated feather shape but I would suggest you start out with a leaf and trim it down to a feather. You can see feather shapes in googles images if you are perplexed about what they look like, I found one shown below.
I started with this shape and gradually trimmed it thinner along the sides.

When it is dry you can carefully, and slowly clip the barbs (?) The cuts should be downward at an angle towards the quill. If you look at the real feather diagram below you will see on that feather that those cuts will not be uniform throughout.


 
I actually cut one in this shape as well, not sure if it is better or not. In this picture you really can't see all the cuts made into the sides to create the barbs, but they are there!

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