How to make a feather arrow

Have you been inspired by the arrow trend yet?  I’m totally loving it right now and I want to show you how to make some feather arrows that look almost as cool as Katniss Everdeen.
What a crazy past few days we’ve had!  My five year old daughter broke her little arm after falling off of our trampoline.  (Yes, we have a trampoline with out a net.)  I think I was more traumatized than she was after seeing her arm shaped like a zig-zig!  Not the kind of chevron pattern I like to see.  So she’s been enjoying being babied and taken extra care of.  Anyway, back to the arrows…

Materials needed:

• Wooden dowels 1/4”
• Feathers
• Embroidery floss
• Paint
• Glue
• Craft knife
• Sewing thread & needle

Get yourself some some wooden dowels about 1/4” thick.  It’s better if you use the solid wood kind and not the bamboo, so it doesn’t splinter.  If that’s all you’ve got then you can just skip the parts where you cut into them and decorate it anyway.  I cut a slit into the top like so.


Using my X-acto blade, I sharpened the tip.  After I was done, I wondered if using a pencil sharpener would have been just as effective.

Let me pause a minute to show you one of the feathers that came from the package.  What the??  Yes, that’s electrical tape.  Why did they include this one?  Shouldn’t they have just thrown it out?  I thought that was funny.

Cut your feather about 2 or 3 inches from the top using your craft knife.

Then cut of the tip so you get a shape like the one below.  You will do this to two feathers if yours one have one good side like mine did.  It seemed like all mine were smooshed on one side.

Then you’ll slice down the middle of the feather.  This part is kind of tricky if you try to slice in the hard center.  You can just slice close to it on the side.

So now you should have two feathers shaped like this.

Add a bit of craft glue to help it stay secured while you use a needle and thread to sew on the feather to the top where the slit was cut into the dowel.  My feathers were stuck together, so using a needle was much easier.

Using various colors of embroidery floss, I wrapped around the base of the feathers and glued the floss down at the end.  I had some glittery floss that added a nice touch, too.



Paint the tips above the arrow and you’re finished!  Now I’m dying to make a bow and see if these really work even though they were originally intended for decoration.  I’m just not sure yet what I’d use to make one.  What do you think?