Laurie Hall
Laurie Tavan
Laurie Tavan
I use burnt ostrich feathers often in 20th C headdresses and hat ornaments or for earlier periods to stand in for other types of feathers as above. In the left photo they are standing in for a Bird of Paradise tail. In the right photo they are standing in for Egret (center of the headdress). In the middle photo, the upright feathers are real Egret feathers. Below are some links to other articles where I have used burnt ostrich. In the first one I also describe the burning process. You might want to read that article as well as that one before you attempt to burn some ostrich or peacock flue.
Burning
Because the bonds that hold the smallest side branches (barbules) of both the ostrich and Peacock feathers on are fairly weak they can be chemically broken leaving just the center shaft and the side branches (vanes or barbs). This process also stiffens what remains. This burning can be done with household bleach. The steps are as follows.
Choose your feathers. I’m just going to use the tips so a damaged plume works just fine. If the bird had mites when alive and you can see the damage when you burn the feather to existing damage gets worse and the barb will break along that line so they are not good choices for burning. More on mite damage here.
Take away any extra parts of the feather you will not want in the final plume.
Gather together bleach, a bucket of rinse water, a shallow plastic tub and some newspaper. You will want to work outside and wear old clothes and rubber gloves.
Toss a few of the feathers into half an inch of bleach. Move them around so that they are covered. Watch them carefully. They will foam and you will see the smallest branches drop off. This only takes a minute or so.
When you see that only the main stem and the first set of side branches remain move the feathers to the rinse water.
Repeat with all the other feathers you want to do.
The bleach will continue to work for many feathers. It is best to dispose of the used bleach properly. It does contain some dye. If your neighborhood has a household hazardous waste program use it.
Here are the batches I did in clean rinse water. The feathers are not really bleached they do not lose their natural color or the dye color but sometimes the dye color changes. The black ones stayed black the red ones got a little darker red. Once I burnt some pastel pink drabs and they turned a nasty coral color so, results can be unexpected.
With burnt feathers it is best to blot them dry and then carefully comb out the branches and air-dry them one at a time. You can see that they are still loosing some of the color onto the paper towel. That is to be expected most dyed feathers loose color when they get wet. That is why it is a good idea to keep them dry.
Controlled burning
The Museum of Fine Arts Boston has a very nice with only sections of the fronds burnt away. Here is how you could do something similar.
On a piece of paper draw lined to indicate the sections where you want to burn the feather and where you do not, cover this with plastic wrap. The best ostrich feathers to use for this process are those with really long barbules.
Spread the feather out over the lines and weigh it down, I used a small rock on the stem. Then pour a small amount of full strength bleach into a plastic container. Using an inexpensive (synthetic not natural fiber) 1” brush to gently daub the bleach onto the feather. You need to work rapidly, cover all the areas you want to burn in a minute or so. Give it another minute or so, the areas with the bleach will foam and yellow a little as in the photo. You will know it is done if you poke the areas with the bleach and you can see that all the side branches have fallen off. Rinse the feather well and dry and fluff as above.
I removed the fronds from this feather and bundled them together with some glue tape and bound it with Florist tape to create this pompom. Check the “all things feather” section of this site for a how-to on making pompoms.
Close up of pompom and partially burnt vanes.
Back to the triangular clipped ostrich feathers from the burning section. They had also been stripped to remove many of the vanes along the bottom of the main stem.
I used the curling iron to shape them then joined them with glue and Florist tape to three of the burnt red ostrich drabs to make this cluster. The red feathers are not curled but both the tip and the base are glued and taped into the stem bundle.