![]() So, the first cut is made from the top, not what you’d expect, I know. The top is situated on the convex side of the feather, like, if you hold the feather in your hand to write, you want the quill curved with the convex side up, and concave side down, like sheltering your hand, to rest comfortably in your hand. It’s “top” is the one you would see when writing, and that will get the slit like nibs have. That being said, all that remains is cutting the feather. It’s not that important anyway, if you can’t remove the stuff, just press it to the end of the tube with a stick and it will stay there. It has to be a stiff blade so that it won’t bend and wobble while you cut, and very sharp so that you can cut things with one single diagonal strike and not have to make the back and forth movement like with a saw, that would give uneven results, some kind of “stairs” to your cut.Īlso at some point you have to remove the residue inside the feather shaft/tube, people use all kinds of self-made instruments for that, I used a crochet but I could improve my instrument. The reason why the blade has to be short is so that you have good smooth control over it. And very very sharp – you can see I used a jewelers rouge (that chunky white stuff in the photo) – that works like a very fine sand paper, you rub it onto the backside of a leather piece and then sharpen the knife on it. It seems the perfect knife should be small and not flexible. I prepared quite a lot of tools to try and find the perfect one, the only ones I found useful were the little blade (used for thinning leather) and the crochet. It is called tempering, and I imagine the feather shaft is similar as in structure to the fingernails, they get soft in water but harden in heat. Indeed it had an interesting effect, it hardened the quills quite a lot. Second, I dipped them in hot sand (from the oven) and left them there till the sand was cold. Well… depending on what you call fast – first, I sunk the feathers in water overnight Step one – find a tutorial that you think you can trust – I followed this one: Īs with all things I didn’t followed the step-by-step tutorial exactly by the book, and tried to see what works best for me. ![]() This is how my feather quill making journey begins. ![]() So what better thing would be, for someone that writes in her own self made books, than to try and make her own writing instruments? From time to time, my mind urges me to make something different, to try something new.
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