A fair start

Today I skipped out on a bunch of work I should have been doing (I will pay for this over the weekend, as I have about 5-10 hours of contract work to do before Monday) to work on the peacock-feather costume. After about two (maybe three) hours’ work, I have managed to cover about 1/5 of the first 1/2 of the first type of feathers. What does that get me, about 5% done? But I hadn’t expected to go much faster – it’s very slow, covering things in feathers. If the feathers were larger (say, if they were tail feathers) I could “cheat” and use a sewing machines, but these feathers are small enough that they pretty much need to be sewn by hand. It’s OK; I’m enjoying the process.

Here are two pix, one showing the overall design and one giving a closeup of the feathers. The two “wings” (i.e. the bra part of the piece) will be in blue peacock body feathers, the belly will be green “scale” peacock body feathers. To get the blue to be near-solid, I had to overlap the feathers substantially, so despite the feathers being 1″ long or so I’m sewing them on about every 1/3″. The feathers are beautiful, blue at the tips and turquoise further down the shaft, then giving way to dark gray fluffy down (I’ve been trimming that part off). Each feather is held down by two stitches about 1/8″ apart.

I’m not sure if I’ll have enough feathers, but I certainly bought a lot of them – 1 full ounce, which is about a gallon ziplock bag full – and I can always order more if I need them.