I’m a very “do it yourself” kind of person so this quill making activity was right up my alley…or so I thought. Aside from the inevitable messiness that comes with ink, my quill making experience was a pleasant activity. Whether my quill would be a success or not did not seem to bother me.
The quill making process was quite easy, the difficulty was when it came to actually using my quill. I found that I needed to actively engage more muscles in my hand (I found myself writing with fingers I don’t generally use to write when using a standard pen.
As I was writing with my quill, I reflected on how the act of writing has changed and evolved in many ways. To set the record straight, writing with a quill was no easy task. I found I possessed very little elegance or even control over how I was writing. There was a lot of haphazard smudging, as you can see in my images.
If I were in the 18th century, I would think that whatever I chose to write would have to be meaningful to me as it would take a tremendous amount of effort and time to simply get my thoughts on a piece of paper. Personally, I believe that writing has a different flow than typing does. I feel more robotic and less candid when I type. I believe hand-writing evokes another layer of personality than typing does. I prefer writing over typing. Generally I choose to write drafts before I get near a computer to type. In fact, I hand wrote most of this blog before I typed it, its just more natural for me.
