I received some vintage/antique feathers and this is the tale of two of the multiple ostrich feather plumes and a Rooster Hackle Dyed Furnace ornament. So, three.
Ostrich Plumes
I started with this plume (underside on the top, upper side on the bottom), it is made up of 4 or 5 feathers sewn together down the stem (more later) and it has a problem that ofter happens with shaped ostrich plumes. When lots of feathers are stacked the main stem gets tightly folded under.
This is the second plume, this one is 26″ long and about 10″ wide. For something that I would date to the Edwardian because of its length it is very good condition. More on that later.
I can’t date this feather but as is common with multiple ostrich feather plumes it is stitched together but from the upper side you can not see the stitching because the stitch goes right thru the stem.
As is also the case the stems near the base are trimmed down so they are not so thick. Then below the barbs the remainder of the stems are bundled together with thread. Usually it matches the feather so this might have been replaced.
From the under side you can see the thread used to hold the feathers together running down the center with a buttonhole stitch every inch or so.
On this plume the thread was broken about 2″ from the end so I glued down the end of the thread so it would stay tight and not continue to unravel.
After fixing the thread, I steamed the feather to fluff the barbules and to soften the stem a little.
With my hands on either side of the sharp bend in the stem and my thumbsnails on the upper side and my fingers on the underside, I carefully bent the stem back and twisted in the opposite direction to the fold. Because you do not want to break the stem this needs to be done in small increments.
I eventually got the stem back to straight.
This is what it looked like when I was finished.
One thing I want to say about this plume it had lots of feathers that were not what I would call prime. They had mite damage. That happens when the bird are infested with mites while they are growing their feathers. You can spot it in feathers as a line of triangular voids in the barbules. This damage makes the barbs fragile and likely to break. While I was working on this plume it lost lots of bard fragments. That is not to case with the black plume, I did not see any mite damage and no fragments broke off.
This plume also had a bend in the upper stem and one in the middle I wanted to fix.
This plume was made up of at least 6 feathers (all prime) they were trimmed to a fairly uniform 10″ width and it had a stiff wire added between to stem based.
I used the same technique of steaming and repeated bending of the stem to reshape the stem.
Rooster Hackle Furnace (neck) feather ornament
This is the Rooster feathers ornament, I have no idea how old it is not all that old (vintage not antique) I was made from over dyed strung Rooster hackle neck feathers. which you can still get today.
This is how it looks from the back. The strung feathers were sewn onto a circular pad. A it looks like only the surface feathers were Neck feathers but there is a layer of regular rooster chest feathers under. The regular ones do not have that Flame look with the black edge.
I added both the black ostrich and the Rooster plumes to this hat. In fact I even added an extra black ostrich plume something like the long one but a little shorter and not as wide. That helped cover the base of the long one. One thing I did differently with the shorter one was wash it. These old antique plumes have so much dust in them that they smell musty. So, because the shorter plume was much like the first and was not loosing barbs I figured why not wash it. I used warm water and dish soap. I gently swished it in the water and then dried it off with a paper towel. Then, blow dried and it on high heat with just a little gentle fluffing.