Turkey Quill Pens

We have some wild turkeys that come through the property on a daily basis, one day I counted as many as 68 turkeys pecking and scratching around.

When they would leave for the day to find other food, they frequently left behind feathers (and lots of other stuff). I started picking them up because they were just so cool looking. Lots of iridescent colors, different sizes and shapes. When I had 30 or so feathers, and kept finding more every couple of days, I realized I needed to actually do something with them. I took me another week or two to get the idea of quill pens. After some Googling and YouTubing I found instructions for cutting the quills. I made a few pens and bought some ink from the craft store.


Making the pens turned out to be the easy part, it only take a few minutes to make each one. The hard part was re-learning to cursive script. I scribble down short reminders on scrap paper, but I hadn't hand written multiple, complete sentences and formed paragraphs in a long time (damn e-mail and word processors). And when I did hand write anything I use regular print characters not cursive. Sad but true.

Here are a couple of the letters I wrote...

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