Leather Feather Blog Hop!

So a while back Rachel Mallis convoed me out da blue and asked if I wanted to be in a blog hop for her leather feathers. I've never played with leather feathers so I was like sure! Now, I was on the etsy app at the time, you see, so her name wasn't clickable. Usually, I'd just go right over to her shop and check out her style. But without realizing it, I just assumed she was the maker of these:
Which I've seen recently, and are actually from TreeWingsStudio. When the feathers arrived, they were actually:

Which I loved! Incredibly soft, thin, and in a very 'me' color-scheme I could easily incorporate into my makies.
OK, but then I was telling Mr. Devices what a goof I am for agreeing to a blog hop without even seeing the key element, so I etsysearched leather feathers to show him the ones I thought it was... and what I got made me realize how much I'd truly lucked out.

I actually think all these examples from Google Images are lovely (really!), just not something I could have done anything with.

Phew! ANYways...
Obviously, the feathers cry out to be made into earrings or hair pins but I thought it was unfortunate that I'd only be able to make one pair of whatever. Knowing me and my aversion to symmetry, well, here's what I did:

OOne is antique lace stitched over a wire frame (dark steel, so no oxidizing later to mark up the already-grungy lace) and the other is a tin cut-out over which I added layers of embossing powders with touches of alcohol ink around the edges.

I later realized that I did all that stitching with crazy fragile old lace that tears if you breathe on it, so I added layers of polyurethane (Varathane, for sealing polymer) on the reverse side to keep it strong and even flexible. When I went to snap an image of the reverse sides to show y'all how I'd made them I found my city of origin on the tin! You can see I marked it with the magenta on the image- just on the picture, not on the actual tin, ya goofball.  Click on it!
Added all kinds of danglies and voi-la.

Now that's some serious asymmetry there. I managed to balance even the tiny variations in shade across both earrings- see how parts are more yellow-cream and others more grey-white? 

Trying to get these to hang right was super aggravating. I'd had in mind a lot longer hanging strips of leather ribbon in a more Native American style but oh well. You can't see but the mop button is carved in a cool Art Deco pattern. I'm a novice at hair pins, it was harder than I thought.

So that was my leather feather adventure. Thank you so much Rachel, I hadn't down a hippity-hop in years and I had fun. Here's the other participants to go check out:

Rachel Mallis (host) www.mintmonarch.com

Inge von Roos ingetraud.wordpress.com

Lori Blanchard alainnjewelry.WordPress.com

Linda Anderson fromTheBeadBoard.blogspot.com

Deb Fortin www.mhotistudio.blogspot.ca

Rebecca Robertson White morganafeycreations.121hub.com/#sec-blog

Lucy Bejarano lucybejaranojewelry.blogspot.com

Jenny Kyrlach anafiassa.blogspot.com/

Marina Rios fancifuldevices.blogspot.com/

Georgie Marcu instagram.com/nearlylostjewelry/

Christina Taylor www.dreamcatjewelry.wordpress.com