During the late 1880s and most of the 1890s for evening headdress women wore simple feather headdresses that were vertical and near the center of their tall buns. There are many examples on this page.
I’m going to make one here. It is an example of the tall narrow type that is so iconic.
It starts with three natural white peacock tail feathers.
I cut off the eye and trimmed the rest of the feather to look like a feather.
Then a pile of dyed goose body feathers in yellow and gold ~20 in each pile. I stripped the stems below the one inch mark from the tip on both sides.See the feathers near the bottom of the picture.
On the right is the waste plumage and on the left is what I will need for this headdress.
Same with the gold.
I cut ~20 3″ pieces of thread covered stem wire.
I used the wire to bundle sets of the yellow and gold feathers together.
I used some gold florist tape to cover the part of the wire that twists around the feather stems.
I then bundled them together in sets of two by twisting the wire below the tape.
I trimmed the wires about 2″.
I took a 1.5″ round metal medallion.
With kitchen shears a cut away about 1/4.
Shaped it into a cone.
Bent the points up so they would not stick out.
To make the pick part of the feather headdress I took about 1″ of 20 gauge gold colored copper wire and,
wrapped the middle around a pen and twisted the ends together leaving about 1/2 inch untwisted. I slipped the untwisted end into the cone. Then opened up the ends to match the angle of the cone so that, It could be glued with some E-6000.
I twisted the ends of 5 of the bundles together like this. Because everything is wired it’s possible to spread them out.
Like this.
I wrapped a wire around the yellow feathers with the stems of the three peacock stems stuck in the middle.
I recovered some of the downy feather bases I originally cut off the feathers.
I added the downy bases around the yellow feather flower and wrapped that with wire.
I glued the flower into the cone. Then bent the wire pick at right angles.
I glued one at a time some small gold feathers to fill in the center.
The black portion of this headdress is made from the tips of two ostrich feathers.
The were bundled together with some thin black wire, 28-30 gauge.
That was wired to another pick made from some 22 gauge black wire about 4.5 -5″ long.
The feathers are first wired onto the pick with fine wire.
Then black florist tape is used to cover the fine wire. And the feathers are curled.
The pick is shaped into a curve. This will help it stay in a bun as does the twist in the wire. If necessary a bobby pin can anchor the circle at the bottom.
Both the picks push into the chignon and if necessary can be anchored with a X of two bobby pins near the circle in the wire. This keeps the headdress straight up and and down. Although it usually is not necessary if the chignon is well anchored.