Today I've been finishing my miniature desk dusters.
These are made by winding the stems of 3-4 of the bunches of vivid coloured feathers together to form a little duster shape. I've been buying these, seen below, at 10 for $2 at the sale at feather.com.au.
I'm then winding double satin ribbon around the stems and gluing the long edge with craft glue, and tying toning deeper coloured slim satin ribbon around them to finish.
If the feathers have long stringy bits overhanging, I trim them to make them look neater and more compact.
Here's one with a teaspoon next to it for scale.
Cute, huh?
They'll be packaged in hand made pillow boxes like this...
There are templates all over the internet for folded gift boxes. These are really easy and you generate 8-10 gift boxes from one sheet of project cardboard. So much nicer than bought ones, as you can choose any cardboard you like to make them. Mine is a soft green marble look cardstock.
My gift boxes are tied with hand dyed crepe paper 'ribbon', (this one is softest peach along the edges but you can't really tell in the photograph), and topped with another bargain buy from feather.com.au, their fabric flowers at 15 for $2. I mentioned these the other day on my gift wrapping post using the base of a bunch of celery to stamp gift wrap...see it here.
This one is a cute denim one, perfect for a teen, or tween girl. And the bonus is that they get to keep and wear their rose gift topper as a hair accessory or brooch.
Someone said to me yesterday that they'd wear their feather duster as a corsage too. Okay....if that's what works for you!
Some of my little feather dusters have rhinestone handles too. Very flash indeed. I'll share photos of those soon.
How are your special DIY gifts coming along?
