peacock

Our daughter has been coveting a peacock feather for over a year now. It started on our holiday in California, August 2008. After much searching we found a beauty in a Wholefoods store, as you do, and carried it around with us for a further week or so. Unfortunately they're not completely strong, especially once the quill gives in to constant resistance, and the poor feather became more and more ragged until finally it was consigned to a bin in the departure lounge at San Francisco airport. I'm not convinced it would have been allowed on the plane anyway, although we may have charmed our way around it in the same way we did over the apples we forgot to declare on entry into the USA. A cardinal sin that could have set us back $300, or worse, before we'd even hit the shops!

She's tried several times at our local petting farm in Dorset who keep a pair of peacocks, clearly hoping they'd eventually take pity and yank one out to placate her, but to no avail. The owners are now on full notice to keep one aside for her whenever the moulting should happen.

But oh joy of joys, the day has finally arrived and she is now, at last, the VERY proud owner of not one but two gorgeous feathers from an extremely generous but no doubt cold male peacock.

At the end of a good day's outing to Lulworth Castle, we finally found them, on sale at the animal farm there, and Jemima was so thrilled, the lady gave her an extra feather. Which goes to show, politeness never goes unnoticed! Only trouble is, now I hear that having peacock feathers inside the home is considered bad luck, so they've been relegated to the wendy house, oops!

I think I've managed to make amends by giving her a vintage embroidered table runner I bought recently - which just happens to have a beautiful peacock at either end.

I was hoping to make this into something but it's been strictly forbidden. Watch this space!

Then I remembered I had a stash of gorgeous 1920's bugle beads in all those wonderful peacock colours, so I decided to make them into this bracelet, complete with vintage rhinestone clasp for even more sparkle. The good news? This gets to stay in the house!