 The feathers that are used to make quills come from the wings of large birds like swans and geese. The feathers that are here, these white feathers, are from swans and the darker ones here are from Canada geese, which are large birds. We need large birds because we make pens from the barrels and they need to be of a reasonable size to be able to cut a pen nib shape into it. There are actually feathers for right and left handers. So the feathers for a right hander come from the left wing of the bird and the feathers for a left hander come from the right wing of the bird. So the feathers are first of all cut using a knife or scissors to about 8 or 9 inches because this is the length of a pen. If they're not cut then the whole length of a feather gets in the way. The tip is also cut off and then the outer waxy covering of a feather which will get in the way of writing is removed and here I'm removing it with my fingernail. It can be removed from the back of a knife or scissors in exactly the same way. The membrane that carries the blood supply to the tip of the feather then needs to be removed and nowadays we try and pull this out with a crochet hook as here. It's sometimes quite difficult to get it out. Then the nib shape is cut into the tip of the feather. We use a curved bladed knife because traditionally this is a pen knife. So the first cut is the scoop cut and this is about just over an inch from the tip of the feather and it goes at an angle in and along the length of the feather. Then the shoulders are shaped and these are made either side, not quite as deep as the scoop cut obviously, are long and out to the tip on both sides and you can see that these are shaping the shoulders of the nib. We trim the end off so it looks a little bit like now the shape of an old fashioned nib in a fountain pen. So this pen won't write unless there is a slit which carries the ink through down to the tip of the nib so the slit needs to be put in next and now that's that feather changed into a quill.