Does anyone have any tips on working with feather fronds to make things such as facial hair?  I've read the fraggle building log on muppet central several times, where someone makes fraggle hair out of feather fronds glued to a ping pong ball, but what do you do when the frond bases are going to be in a more visible area like on the front of a face?  I recall in the jim henson's creature shop challenge show they plugged things like hair and feathers, but I'm not quite sure how to go about doing something like a mustache or eyebrows with nothing but short fronds that don't have any sort of toughness and not much extra length to deeply plug.  I'm thinking about taking several fronds and gluing the base of them together so they've got a bit of toughness to them that I can plug into the foam.  I thought I'd ask for tips before I go reinventing the wheel though.

Why not use marabou https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marabou_(fashion)  It is feathers wrapped into a cord at the center. You can pull back the feathers to expose the cord and glue or stitch that to your puppet.

Thanks for the reply.  I usually use marabou for hair on the head.  I did try it for the mustache but it was far too fluffy and just didn't look right so I ordered ostrich feathers to attempt to achieve a look closer to that of Sprocket from Fraggle Rock where the fronds are much longer than marabou provides.  It looks like perhaps they've plugged them but I'm not sure since it covers the full face.



The puppet I'm putting the mustache on is intended to look similar to Murray, one of The Minstrels from Fraggle Rock.  The picture quality is very low so it's hard to see but he's got a feather frond mustache pretty close to what I'm hoping to achieve.