Feather Christmas tree tutorial

This year I wanted to make use of the large amounts of feathers I collected from my poultry. For Christmas dinner we enjoyed one of the turkeys I raised, so I made a feather tree using feathers from that turkey.

I had a few Styrofoam cones lying about - one of those "I'm sure I'll find a use for this someday" items, of which I have many. It's very satisfying when I do actually find a use for it. Justifies all the others...

I got out my low temp hot glue gun and my son and I got to work gluing the feathers on from the bottom up. Since I wanted the tree to have the feathers go lower than the base, I put it up on a cup so the feathers wouldn't be bent on the table.

We roughly sorted feathers as we went along, longest on the bottom, getting smaller and more downy towards the top.

We started to glue the top inch or two of each feather and sticking them fairly close together on the bottom of the cone.  The top didn't matter, as it would get covered by the next layer.

We kept going until we got to the top.

Then we put on the shortest, downiest, poofiest ones at the top.

Finally, a topper that is a paper star and a birch tree looking candle for a base.