Making a Quill Pen: Transcript

Includes Casey Kaleba, Folger teaching artist, and Mary Schaller, Folger docent.

CASEY KALEBA: I’m Casey Kaleba and I’m here with Mary Schaller. We’re going to talk to you about quill pens.

[Both hold quill feathers]
Now, you might have seen paintings or pictures of people that look like they were writing with a feather. And they were. It was a quill pen. And the word comes from the quill feather, which was found on the wing of the bird.

MARY SCHALLER: All right. The quills we’re using today are real goose feathers. They come mostly from the wing section of the geese.

[Displays a feather]
And that may sound like it’s cruel, but you don’t have to kill the goose in order to get the feathers. If you’re raising geese, you want to make sure that they don’t fly away. So, you are trimming their wing feathers anyway. So, this is what you do with the extra feathers.

[Displays bottom end of feather]
Now, we’re going to be concentrating on the point, because you have to trim the point to make your pen point. For the quill, you have to make sure that the bottom part is clean. So, you all smooth down, and if you feel any sort of residual feather down there, just scrape it off. You want to have a nice, clean quill.

[Makes first cut] Now, the first thing you are going to do is make a cut. Can you see? I’m making it on an angle. It’s not a straight cut. It’s a cut on an angle towards the point. And [cuts], okay.

[Displays cut end, tucks in excess material]
Now, you may find that when you’re looking inside the quill at this point in time, that there is stuff in there. All right, that is part of the feather, actually. You want to get rid of it. So you can take your spare quill and just push it back up in there.

[Makes second and third cuts]
Now, the next cut that I make is straight across the point. So, that’s straight down here. The third cut is the tricky one, because you have to stick your scissors just inside the straight edge. And you’re going to make a straight cut straight up.

Now, this allows the ink to flow down so that you can write. One important thing with writing with a quill—don’t press hard. You’re used to, probably, strangling your pens and pencils, by pressing hard and pressing hard on the paper. You can’t do that with a quill. Think of the quill almost as a combination of a pen and a paintbrush. All right, let’s do it!

CASEY: [To students] So, we’re going to make our three cuts. And remember the first one is that diagonal cut. Then we’re going to do a second cut just straight across the tip. And then the third one is going to be feeding just ever so gently up into the feather. You don’t have to go very far. And it’s just a snip right up the line of the quill. So, let’s see our first couple of cuts.

[Casey, voice-over as students cut quills] For hundreds of years, quill pens were very common. Shakespeare probably wrote his plays using a quill pen. And the men who worked on translating the King James Bible also had homemade pens and ink.

[Voice-over as students dip quills in ink and write]
A quill pen works by drawing ink into a small cut made at the bottom of the feather. As the ink runs out, you have to dip your pen back into the ink to refill it. Writing with a quill pen does take practice.

[Students continue writing with quills]
MARY: An activity leader should be aware that you can have blots. You can have spatters. And they should have on hand some sort of blotting paper, paper towel, to blot up these things. So, be aware. Now, these kids managed to get through it all without too many blots and mistakes and what not. But that’s not always the case. At the end, we had to pull them away from what they were doing. Writing with the ink they had made and using the quills that they had cut, they were having the best time. And, I think, when you want to say hands-on history, you’ve got it right there.

[Students displaying their work, with Casey and Mary]
CASEY: So, we’ve taught you how to make the ink and how to make the quill pen. Now you can sign your name, write a note, or even try your hand at some poetry. You’ve got the tools, the rest is up to you!