I’m caught in the whirl wind called Christmas and I haven’t the time for a wordy post so I’ll go with the concept of a picture being worth a thousand words.
This fan is from the Costume Museum of Canada and it is dated 1880-90. It is very pretty but definitely showing its age. The slats of the fan are no longer joined at the top so if you tried to open it, it wouldn’t have the typical fan shape…there would be gaps and it would all flop around. The top white feathers must have originally stood up but were perhaps stored for an extended period in a cramped space and now they are bent. The sweet little blue feathers will fall off with the slightest stirring. But those blue feathers are what caught my attention. Very pretty. I wonder what bird they came off of.