Feather-eria

Hi guys! This is a DIY post for all of you who have been intrigued by my recent feather obsession.

Background

Just to give you a little background, I have been into collectibles for as long as I can remember.

Postage stamps and coins have been my major points of interest since childhood. Last year, leaves started fascinating me in ways I never imagined. On my trip to Swat, I brought back with me huge rubber plant leaves which I ended up painting. I am sharing one of these with you here.

After my leaf obsession, I switched to Rock/stone painting where I painted a rock with a forest landscape from our trip to Sharan Forest. Here is a picture of that:

How I was hit by feathers

Last year on our trip to Kalash, my fascination with feathers started. I saw most of the locals with a gorgeous turquoise colored feather on their Gilgiti cap. I asked to get one but I couldn’t. Months passed by. One early morning in office, I read out a comment from my friend on my painted leaf picture on Facebook that her daughter loves to paint on leaves too and now she wants to paint on feathers. The moment I read the comment, my colleague and I were fascinated and instantly typed ‘Feather painting’ on Pinterest.

Feathers DIY Project

We were blown away by Pinterest as usual. We couldn’t talk about anything other than feathers and how cute they are the whole day. When we went out on our lunch break, we saw a dirty crow’s feather on the ground. We both looked at each other and thought it’s too dirty and how will we ever collect so many feathers from outside. I checked on Ali Express App and found such a good and reasonable collection. We ordered 100 feathers immediately and took 50 each.

Once the order was delivered, I started painting each feather with a different pattern. Thanks to my extremely busy weekday routine, I could only work on the weekends (that too was a huge challenge due to our extreme socializing levels). Today I am sharing some photos from this project.

I told my colleague that I want to get black colored velvet cloth as a background for colored feathers wall hanging. Her father went to a shop in Gujranwala and got me the cloth for free. I kept asking that I wanted to pay him but he didn’t accept. These are the little gestures I love my country for. I then went to Anees Book Shop in Main Market Lahore to get Fabric paint marking paint in gold color. I wrote on the four wall hangings using this.

Finally once all feathers were painted. I cut the velvet cloth into four sections. Divided the feathers by four, thought of tag-lines for each:

• Chalo sath urhein
• Urtay khwab
• Be wild and free
• Fly high (Urtay panchi wouldn’t been better though)

I then started working on my final product. I used UHO glue tube to stick all feathers to the velvet cloth in different patterns for each.

Completion

In the end, I went to Main Market in Lahore and got them all framed. Sharing the final look with you guys. I would love to know your thoughts on this project.