How To Make Long Feather Hair Clips

Hi, this is Michelle from how to make feather earrings. Today, you get to see the crazy lady behind the camera and I am doing my very first video tutorial, so I hope you'll be kind and also, let me know if anything doesn't work for you audio levels. Things like that and, as you can see, I'm using a microphone to try to make things a little bit easier for you to hear you eliminate the background noise. So the tutorial today is probably going to be a little bit messier than what you're used to seeing on my site, because well I don't have the ability to clean up each and every photo for you, but hopefully it'll also give you a better idea of how Things are actually done now. This tutorial is intended to address a couple of questions that I've received on my site, lately, one of them about using very tiny feathers or very small feathers to make earrings and the other to make feather hair clips. So if I hope that this will help you out with both of those and if you have any questions still after I'm done by all means, leave them in the comments, and I will address them as well as I can. What you're going to be needing today is the usual two pairs of pliers. What I have here are the round nose, jewelers pliers and the needle nose or long nose, pliers and then also a pair of wire cutters. You'Ll need some wire, although to be honest for this wire, we don't need the wire cutters. We could cut this with scissors because it's so fine and we're using a 34 gauge very fine gauge, because we're going to be working with very fine feathers and anything. That'S thicker than this probably you're not going to be able to wrap tightly enough in order to really get a good grip on those feathers. So, as I said, we're not going to use the wire cutters well, we are going to use the wire cutters to cut it, but it's not necessary what the wire cutters are really necessary for is cutting the chain. That'S going to make up the length of the hair clip, and I also wanted to mention that, if whether you I don't know if you're viewing this on youtube or on my site. But if you're on you to make sure you click through to my site, because I actually have links to resources for everything that I'm I'm talking about and using today. So if you need anything, if you see anything that you don't already have or don't know where to get just click on through and you'll be able to find out where to get it. I'Ve also got a hair clip here, which is one that I just happened to have on hand it's one of their very, very inexpensive. I don't even know how long I've had this one, but you could also use a larger barrette style that you can buy in the craft store like Michaels. That has holes on it that are intended for beading, but you could obviously use them to attach this or you could use the traditional alligator clip or roach clip as they're sometimes called. But I'm just using this because I have it handy and of course you need feathers. Today, I'm going to be using some marabou grizzly feathers, concentrating on the black and white theme. I'Ve also got some mallard flanca feathers and some Guinea feathers. These are from a Guinea. In very pretty black and white spotty, so first thing you're going to do is get your feathers and your wire together, and you want about six to eight inches of wire. So I'm just going to snip that off about there and you double your wire like so, and it's okay to you know pinch it down so that it's a nice little narrow loop. Then you take the end of the wire and you line it up with the end of your feathers. However, you want your feathers arranged if you want them back-to-back, so they get a little more volume, that's cool, so you lined it up with the end of your feathers like so no farther beyond, and then you begin to wrap and from there you just wrap and Wrap and wrap as tightly as you can without breaking the feathers. You can see there that the feather quills are bending a little bit but they're not breaking, and you wrap until nothing is left on the end of that wire, except a little loop like so. Hopefully, you can see that and I'm going to do it again just for demonstration purposes, so you can see how easy and quick it goes. Take these bracelets. I love me some grizzly feathers, you double your wire and your Ranger feathers and keep your wire or two than the ends of your feathers and just wrap and wrap, and you can do this, you know. Obviously, if you do it more slowly and carefully. It'Ll come out looking a little bit neater, but honestly that fluff of the feather tends to cover up most of the wire anyway. So then, when you have several of those which, through the magic of video, I already do you cut yourself a length of chain which is, as I mentioned, you use your wire nippers for since obviously I've already cut my chain. I cut it about eight inches long. I'M just going to show you how to attach them to that chain. I think I forgot to mention this in the beginning. Sorry about that when I was going through the ingredients, but one of the other that the last thing you're going to need are some jump rings and the size of the jump rings. Isn'T all that important? I know. Normally, I specify you know X, number of millimeters or whatever, but to be honest, it's just not that important in most cases here, the only thing you might have to worry about is making sure that your jump ring will go around whatever size opening you have for Your hair clip so I'd, say these are probably five millimeter, which is a nice big size to work with on camera. So, as you saw me, I twisted the jump ring open, I'm just gon na hook it through the chain, one of the links like so and then I'm gon na take my bundle of feathers. Here I'm going to hook that on there and then I'm going to twist it close because if you've ever read any of my other tutorials, I always caution you to twist and they see how nicely that comes back together again. Sometimes they don't come back together perfectly and you have to squish it a little bit this time it worked exactly as it's supposed to and so same thing here again find the opening, which quite honestly, is a little bit difficult. Even in this light there we go twist that bad boy open and decide where you want to hook it on your chain, I'm gon na hook it in between these last two and just hop the loop on your feathers and twist it closed oops. If you can get a hold of it without throwing things up like so twist it loose and for the final step now, you can see I've got feathers all the way down to the end on this one end, but I left a little length of chain up Here at the top end - and that's so that I have something to attach the last jump ring and hair clip to - and I've already opened, this particular jump ring, I'm going to open the hair clip too as well, because what I'm gon na do is. Let me get this down here, so it's shown. Okay, I'm going to hook it through this inner hole on the hair clip and then just hook it through that last link of chain, like so close that up, which might be a little harder to do than say there we go perfect and then you have one Finished feather, so I appreciate you taking the time to watch this. This is like I said in my first video, so any feedback is welcome and if you have any suggestions for tutorials like you'd like to see in the future, I'd love to hear those as well and again. This is Michelle from how to make feather earrings if you'd enjoyed this. I hope you'll stop by my site and even sign up for my email mailing list. I do giveaways every month this month. It'S going to be this feather here, clip which this month is well. This coming month is going to be June of 2012. So if you missed out on that, though, there's always something else to give away so come by and sign up anytime. Thank you for watching, and I hope you have a great day.