hi I'm Barbara welcome to yes phases today we're going to make some paper feathers this year I created a peacock themed tree as a gift for my mother to put in her entry hall and I did not show step-by-step instructions about how to create the feathers because I was just making them up as I went along and creating them for effect but I've gotten emails and questions from a number of you so I want to show you how I created the feathers first of all start by finding some fun papers in peacock colors a range of colors not all one color I also liked the idea of using something with the pattern on the tree I used something with a more muted pattern than this but I thought this would be fun to use on camera and I don't think it's bad to have a pop of another color to give it a little bit of contrast on your final product I created two shapes of peacock feathers one is just your standard long and narrow and for those I do these lines with sharpies so that you can see them clearly I did not draw these on my actual paper because I do not want thick black lines on my final peacock feathers so I cut along this outside line and then I just started making slits in the direction of the lines that I've shown you there so let me finish by making these last few slits now you can see I've less than an inch and I'm probably going to make 10 cuts lots and lots of cutting involved you can actually invest in paper art scissors instead of using these lovely scissors with the broken handle from my daughter's seventh grade art project um then you open them now I don't want the pink to actually be my front so I'm going to fold these again I like having the fold down the center because it gives you the vein of an actual feather now I like to go through and rough up I curl the mane i curled them back on the very end I used my thumbnail and curled them like you would a ribbon I curled in both directions up and down so that they were nice and have some movement on them for when I put them on the tree they don't just those little slits and all that work I put in doesn't just disappear I actually did try curling these with a pair of scissors and they ripped then what I did is I ran my thumb along the bottom part to make it curl that way and the top part underneath to make it curl that way so that they hang like this from the branches of the tree it's the first type second type is your more traditional peacock feather but I didn't try to emulate exactly there are a number of ones out there where they do contrasting colors I'm showing you here the outline of how I cut it and where it's dark black I cut out the paper so on this one I've started to cut this is this end and then I'm going to cut out the target sort of design I actually remove the center Center one and then I can't cut obviously from side to side these cut these radiating circles because if I cut all the way through there'll be nothing left to hold my thing together and I'll just have a giant hole and I am going for having those lines there so I won't cut the second one but you get the idea I'm going to have two sets of those when I'm finished and then it's going to look like this now I went ahead and cut the feathers up here sideways because I wanted a lot of movement on my tree did the same thing with my fingers oops you're going to lose a few my same thing curled them and I just did dozens of these at one piece of paper you can get four or five feathers I spent four and a half hours five hours making the peacock feathers for my treat to old movies at least I like to watch old black-and-white movies on the movie channel while I do this kind of monotonous work its cheerful better than the news now I have two great kind of feathers curb this one so it'll plant into the leaves of the tree as well I have two different great kinds of feathers and once I have them in all these different colors it's going to make for a very colorful tree let's take a look at the final product