feathers – Ali Does It Herself

I hope you all enjoyed your Canada Day/Independence Day long weekend! And if you didn’t get to celebrate a national holiday this weekend then I hope at least it was sunny where you were. Speaking of sun, I bought this hat at IKEA last summer for 99 cents. It is great to wear to baseball games to protect my pasty white skin.

Now I’ve discovered that it’s also a fantastic wearable parasol for LongJohn (so named because he’s a lanky albatross like his dad) when I’m wearing him out and about.

The problem is that in a good breeze the parasol becomes a parasail and I lose the darned thing. It’s very hard to chase down a hat while wearing a baby. So I need to make some modifications to keep the thing on my head, and while I do that, I might as well have some fun with it, right? With that in mind, I dug out a huge pink grosgrain ribbon.

I cut it to match the band around the hat. I set that aside for the moment.

Then I took two more pieces and wove them into the inside of the band, for straps to tie coquettishly around my chin. I felt very much like a Jane Austen character, dressing a bonnet, while I was doing this.

Tied off the ends to prevent fraying.

And then decided I needed a feather in my cap.

And because it was Pride Week in Toronto (Ottawa’s isn’t until August and it’s much more low key), I decided to put a rainbow of feathers in my cap.

I wound them together with some wire.

Used a bit of hot glue to ensure they stayed that way.

Then wove the wire end into the hat to fix the feathers in place.

And I managed to do all of this while still wearing LongJohn.

Then I glued the first piece of ribbon around the band, leaving room for the hat to expand as it gets squashed on my head.

And I took another piece of grosgrain, this one in black, and fashioned a rosette out of it.

The rosette fit nicely on top of the feathers, hiding the wire machinations.

Tada, my Mom Hat that I can wear with Pride!

So. If you’re anywhere in the world that has been experiencing winter this year, you know that it pretty much has universally sucked. In Ottawa, and Canada in general, we just got wind that winter isn’t ending anytime soon. In fact, the forecast is so depressing that our country’s senior government meteorologist has gone into hiding. I kid you not.

So I’m doing what I do every year and going into denial. I’m going to pretend it’s spring with a pretty fake bouquet in my front hall.

I picked up a bag of feathers from Value Village for $1.99 about two weeks ago. Inside the bag were four packages of craft feathers from White Rose, which was a craft supply store similar to Michael’s that went out of business when I was a teenager.

Three packs of white chicken feathers and one pack of dyed chicken/other bird feathers.

Also, holy smokes feathers are staticky.

I didn’t want an all white bouquet with accents of brown, so I decided to dye the feathers to suit my mood. I’ll leave the ones that are already coloured for something else.

Find a dye-proof container (usually a glass bowl), and drop in 4 cups hot water, 2 teaspoons white vinegar, and lots of food colouring in the colour of your choice. I went with red, purple, and orange.

Jam those feathers in and squish them down. You want to bedraggle them as much as possible. You can un-bedraggle (undraggle?) them later once they’re dried.

Leave them in the dye baths for 5 to 15 minutes. The longer you leave them in, the darker they will get.

I picked plastic bins for my dye batches because I could cover them when I left them unsupervised. I suspect if you have small grabby children this might come in handy.

Pull the feathers out of the dye baths and set them to dry for several hours on a paper towel. Just a warning that until the feathers are completely dry, they will still stain things with food colouring, so be careful where you set them.

I thought that the orange batch was doing better than the other two, and I later found out why. In the orange batch, you can see that I only have two of these long feathers with the rounded tips. All the other ones have the flat tips.

In the red/pink, the proportion of long round ones is higher. For some reason these round ones are more waterproof (I’m sure someone who knows more about feathers knows why but I don’t really care).