Craft Class with Sal Garcia: Smudge Feather

My name is Sal. I work for the South Florida Tribal Council and today I'm going to show you how to create a smudging feather. So what we want to do is we want to have a sheet of leather and as you can see we have a sheet of leather right here and if you don't have leather then you can grab just a regular piece of canvas like this. So what you're going to need is you're going to need a ruler, a pen, some sinew, a lighter, and some scissors. I always use a pencil. So what you want to do is you want to grab your ruler put your ruler down and it's usually the thickness of this or you can go two inches depends on how large of the feather you have. So we're going to go ahead and grab the ruler, lay it down, then you would want to grab your feather and just envision like that. How much fringe do you want to hang? So the feather is going to be here so you can have the fringe come down to here. So you'd probably want to go eight and a half or even nine inches down. So you grab your ruler make it very simple you think of nine inches lay it down and then trace it. After you cut out your piece of leather you have one of these right here it's like a square almost the perfect size of your ruler. These rulers come in handy so you want to grab your piece of leather you want to grab your feather like this and hold it here and you want to mark it you want to come down to right about here and you want to take your your pen or your pencil and make a mark on it. The value and the meaning of of how it is to create your smudge feather and since we are supposed to be staying at home we would like to take it to the community and share throughout the Native community and share what we were doing at the Intertribal Council before the COVID-19 and invite everyone that we still are continuing to serve the community and help the community even though in this case it has to be throughout the YouTube or videoing and zooming and such. Put your mark you put it there and then you grab your feather and wrap it so you want to grab some sinew or I heard some people call it sinew some sinew and you want to maybe just I usually go arm length like this and there's always going to be a lot left over and I usually use that to wrap my feathers on my um on my feather capes so you want to use a little bit of tacky glue just to hold it in place and you want to grab your sinew and tie it when you start wrapping. Yeah of course it's going to be too long but it's okay and when you get down to the bottom you hold it like this and you just keep turning and tie it at least four times and then we grab our lighter and then we burn it we burn the sinew the sinew kind of just like melts into place and you got your smudge feather.