the very first step in making the quill beads that I use in my crafts and my jewelry is selecting out the best quills for the job there are different sizes and types of quill in a single porcupine I'll just pull some out for you so you can see the different different types because some quills they're suited perfectly for making jewelry and other quills they're good for nothing except maybe weaving if you're good at doing the porcupine quill quill work in birch bark or on the leather in clothing some of these like this one here is perfect for that when you soak it but as a jewelry piece it's not good so I've sorted out a couple pieces here now the first piece that's right here that's just the guard hair that's it's just a nice long piece of hair this will be great for doing some sort of leaving craft something of that sort so I'll just put that back in there these two quills right here are excellent for doing my jewelry work because they the head pins slide inside of them very easily once they're soaked now these two quills here they are very very thin and they're not good at all for any form of jewelry making that I am doing right yet they are great for doing quill work on birch bark and with beaded headbands and stuff like that so I'll say those for those but these are the only types I'm sorting it right now so I have all of the quills that I want to use all sort it out and the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to do a little bit of a demonstration here seeing if that folks alright is porcupine quills a lot of people would assume that being a wild animal living outside they're going to be full of a lot of dirt and bacteria people think that they're just really filthy disease-ridden creatures like a lot of all the animals you know I'm not sure how true this is but I did read somewhere that you don't have to wash porcupine quills because they apparently have a antibacterial agent in their skin they secrete oil or something that's antibacterial now I'm not really sure how true this is and I'm quite skeptical of that it may be true because being an animal with sharp Barb's once in a while they probably score themselves on and they risk infection but what I'm going to do to test this is alright these have not been cleaned because that's what this video is about I'm going to pour a little bit of peroxide on them to see if they bubble well so for some reason the camera stopped recording there anyway what happened is the peroxide did not bubble whatsoever I wish I could have showed you that I'll get another batch maybe and this is too hot to open but anyway I filled it probably up to here with hydrogen peroxide and I shook it all around there is no bubbling going on whatsoever so I'm assuming that the quills are very clean but nonetheless you do want to clean them really well especially if you're using them for jewelry so it was up to here with hydrogen peroxide I put the lid on shook it up for a couple minutes and then afterwards I put some antibacterial soap over top and filled the jar right up with boiling hot water that's why I'm not handling this as often because it's very very hot but what you can do is just shake the bottle around as much as you can stand to hold it or you can use some other mittens it probably would have been smarter if I had prepared ahead of time but you will see some sediment coming off of those quills there you can see it going around so just let the silk for a while that'll soak off any surface dirt and the hot water will kill off any bacteria that is there even though the hydrogen peroxide picked up absolutely nothing and anybody who cleans of peroxide knows that as soon as you put hydrogen peroxide on a wound on your hand if you're using it for medical or if you put a little bit on a counter top or you put it down the sink it instantly starts bubbling because of the bacteria didn't have it at all on the porcupine quills so there may be a little bit of a valid argument for the theory I had read about porcupines secreting antibacterial agent and I'm not sure how true that is it would make sense if they did have something like that but it's I don't know what to say about it but still even if it was true you still want to clean the quills because just look at all just look at all that sediment that's floating around in there that is coming off of these quills you you definitely want to make sure that that's awesome so we're just going to let this sit cool down a little bit and then we're going to come back and I'll show you the next step alright so what I've done is after this is cooled down I took cold water and replaced the water that was the peroxide mix in the hot water and the soap and I've strained that out I've replaced cold water a couple times and that thoroughly rinsed the quills then I took more hot water and that there's been soaking now what that does is it softens the quill through kind of squishy and for this next step you are going to need them to be soft so you want to remove the barb and you can see there that it tapers to a very thin taper you want to cut that off and instead of just snipping it and having it go flying method I found is put it downwards into the water and just snip that off I'm going to do that with my other hand so that you can see it better you just take it downwards in the water and just cut that so that makes it safer for you to work with your tips are going to be right in the water and they're not going to be a hazard I hope you can see what I'm doing there it's just you put the tip of the quill in the water scissors down snip off and it just slopes up it I'll do it with this nonet sharp and you see if you snip it it just flies but if you do it underwater it's controlled and you're not going to have these go flying end up in your sock or shoes your clothes whatever and if you have pets or children around you don't want them to get a porcupine quill splinter that is not fun so anyway we've got this many of them done so I'm just going to put the lid back on this case the cat comes sniffing right and you want to keep these soaking in warm water because you need them soft I've got a length of stainless steel wire I think this is probably 20 gauge or maybe a little thicker than 20 gauge it could be an yeah I think that's a 20 or 22 it doesn't say on the package but it's stainless steel snare wire and the reason I use stainless is because it does not tarnish it doesn't rust it lasts for a very long time so what you want to do is I don't know if you can see this at all but in the quill here I'm just trying to give out the contrast for you all right you can see there it has a very tiny white tip there it focuses that inside it's the quills made of keratin and inside it's very soft it's kind of like oh there's a blade of grass I bullrushes anybody who know who's ever picked a bulrush it's really soft and spongy inside porcupine quill is the same the exact same and the very soft keratin like material and you can you can push this through but you have to go very slow this is why softening it is so important because you want to be able to push that through without poking it through the the outside keratin so you can see I've pushed that through here and slid it on now you'll want to be very careful that you avoid the edges because you can see a little bit of I don't know if you can see that there because it's not focusing right see you might see a very thin line from the stainless through the quilt that's okay but if it looks lumpy or to form you're going to want to practice this a lot before you can get it all right so just snip that off at the end and leave enough room to put your beads on so this is what you're going to end up with so I'm just going to do a few more of these and bring you back for the next step it's now time to finish these up and put the beads on you've seemed to make these ones here I can get that to focus in it's got the wire sticking straight out of both ends you can also do these on head pins as well so I'm going to have a couple different types and a couple different sizes so to finish off the double end just slip your beads on take your pliers and make a little loop spin up that down and then do the same thing on the other side now if your wires a little bit too long snip it off and there's how this bead looks when it's finished now this bead is going to be used like a spacer or another kind of connector if you want your quills to be at the end of a design you use your head pin and you just finish it up the same way as you had on the other one this one I'm just going to use one bead so as you can see here it's very very easy to make porcupine quill beads one thing that I have learned over the years of doing this is that you definitely want to soak your quills first to make them soft because if you don't it's really hard to get the wire through them and you are more likely to rip them then actually slide your pin or your wire through so once they get a bunch more of these made you're going to do a video showing you how to use them to make a pair of earrings so stay tuned to this channel to see how to use these beads in a project