feather printing with Pico

I've been saving all the feathers Pico sheds in two jars—one for body feathers and the other for tail and wing feathers. After working on 2 feather printing projects at work, I decided to try one with Pico's feathers. So I picked out a couple different sizes from my collection to experiment with.

It turns out the tail and wing feathers work much better than the softer, fluffier body feathers.

The process for printing onto paper is fairly simple. All you need is a brayer, an ink pad, scrap paper, tweezers and of course the paper or stationary you are printing on. Here's how you do it:

1. Place a feather face down on an ink pad. Cover the feather and entire ink pad with a scrap piece of paper. Use the brayer to press and roll over the scrap paper, evenly distributing the ink.

2. Remove the paper and lift the feather up with tweezers by the feather's shaft.

3. Place the feather ink side down on a piece of paper and cover it with a clean piece of scrap paper. Use the brayer to transfer the feather ink to paper by rolling over it a couple times.

note: I find you get better results when you print with the same feather a couple times before printing on your final paper. You can use the same feather a dozen times and get good results, so practice before you print on stationary or whatnot.

4. Remove the paper and feather carefully and you should have a lovely transfer!

5. Let the ink completely dry and add stamped words to personalize it.

I finally completely all my birthday thank you cards. I am embarrassed to say that my birthday was about 3 months ago! oops!

I am about to stuff all the envelopes with the thank you cards and some photos of Pico and off in the mail they go!