Curling feathers

So I've had quite a bit of free time on my hands due to my daft lungs playing up again... I've had a couple of bleeds since the New Year which is incredibly annoying!  There does not seem to be any reasonwhy my lungs just decide to start bleeding, I've had a slight cold but not anything drastic and have actually managed to out some weight on and maintain this so my BMI is around the 20 mark for the first time in years. Anyway rant over, back to the feathers!

Because of my health stupidness I've only been able to manage a light workload, which whilst very dull has at least allowed me to have a bit of an experiment and do some more mad hatting!  One of the things that I have been meaning to try for ages is curling feathers to make decorations for hats and fascinators.  You see these all over the place at John Lewis, Debenhams and so on, but you can usually only buy feathers in their slightly curved original condition.  So having collecter quite a few spikey goose biots (pictured) over the years I thought I'd have a go and curling them. 

Several of my hat books and lots of websites suggest that feathers can be easily curled just like hair, using a curling iron (mine is just a good old Babylis thing I've had for years pictured above) .  I have to say I was rather sceptical about this, and was fairly convinced I would only end up with singed fingers and setting the feathers on fire!  As you can see from the picture and my plastered finger I did indeed singe myself whilst wrapping the feather around the hot barrel, but the curling actually works!

Here are a few of the feathers I have managed to curl-

They are going to be used on a rather elegant black and cream silk mini-pill-box that I am  in the process of making, photos of which will get blogged once its done!