I recently tried burning peacock eyes and wound up with very small almost hairs. completly unusable. I was using only the eye portion, not the surrounding fibers. Did I using eyes that were too small or use the wrong part of the eye feather, or what? any enlightment would be appreciated. Thanks
You did the right part from the sound of it. I’ve tried burning them with bleach (makes them brittle), and using ladies hair removal cream (messy and expensive), and paraffin wax (very messy). I’ve come back to the first method I was shown, a pencil eraser and a board. Every so often I’ll sit in front of the TV for a couple of hours and strip several eyes. You need to cut the quills off the eyes. A friend of mine is diabetic, his blood test strips come in great little plastic containers. I put the stripped quills in those. The dyed ones are just coloured by wiping both sides with an appropriate marker pen. I label each according to the colour in them.
Of course the old adage applies here… Garbage in garbage out. You need to get the best biggest eyes you can.
When you decide that they are not worth the trouble, you will know why Polish Quills are so expensive!
Also there are other ways around getting a stripped body. This is made using a light and a dark moose mane fibre wound together.
Cheers,
A.
The best method I have used is Gulf brand wax . You get at grocery in the canning and freezer dept the stuff grand maw used on her jelly . Low heat melt run stems threw wax let dry strip with finger nail leaves quills very playable and good shine. Do several store in zip lock ready when you need them takes just a minute to do.
Thanks Allen. I do believe that my eyes were too small. Now that you both mention it, I remember the paraffin wax method. I’m gonna try the eraser method, or better yet buy some already stripped. Hook and hackle has them and they’re not expensive. Thanks guys