Making a Quill! Homeschooling For the Fun of It!

freedomtowrite (65)in #theinnerblocks • 5 years ago

We could spend all day long inside text books and historical readings from the library...and then you would find my entire family burnt out and asleep at our homeschool table.

Of course these things have a place, how else are we going to know when it's time to have a fun project? haha

Right now, we are studying the American Revolution, and I was so excited to get to this point of having a fun project to do! The Inventor is always looking for ways to modify my plans from good to great, so when it came time to write a letter pretending he had fought in a battle, he was quick to suggest making quills and ink!

Little did he know, that I had already been googling this! 😉

Now, the Inventor pointed out that the odds of a soldier having had access to a quill and ink were slim, at best he would have had charcoal. I also added that he probably couldn't have gotten the letter to his family, but we threw this sort of logic out the window because too much rationalizing would have stomped the project out flat.

Time To Get Started!

We started out knowing we were going to need feathers...obviously, and turned towards our yard. The Yeti claimed to have seen turkey feathers out there, but that came up empty. So, I turned toward Hobby Lobby in hopes that they would have something affordable, and they did! A whole pack of turkey feathers, I think there were ten the package, for only $2.99! I checked ink out as well, and it was a little more pricey at about $8.00, so I told the kids that we would try to make our own first, and revisit if we needed to.

After watching a fantastic YouTube video, I'll leave the link below, we were fully on our way!

Once we had our quills in place...well as far as we knew haha...we made the ink!

Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures of this part, but I can tell you that we used frozen blackberries mixed the vinegar. I'll also leave a link for where I found the recipe below!

After all of our preparation was complete, we tested it out, and it worked! We couldn't believe it! The berry ink went on nice and smooth, but the only down side was the scratching sound the quill made!

I highly recommend doing this. It gave us such a sense of accomplish that it was totally worth the historical inaccuracies! hahaha

The promised links...