My daughter once took a cattail pillow to school for show and tell. She was in kindergarten or Grade 1, and when she announced that she had a cattail pillow, the teacher and the other children apparently assumed she meant a pillow made from cats’ tails. It took a little clarification before everyone understood that the pillow had been made from the brown sausage-shaped heads of cattails. Fortunately, no cats had been involved.
It is a good story because cattails are one of those plants that become considerably more interesting once you know what they can do. Most people recognize them as the tall plants with the brown heads growing in wetlands. A bushcrafter eventually starts seeing the list of possibilities. Food. Mats. Insulation. Cordage. Footwear. Hats. And, in this case, a pillow. The plant has been standing there the whole time. We were simply late to the conversation.
The pillow itself is remarkably comfortable. Cattail fluff has some of the qualities of down, although it is denser and heavier, and after a while it tends to become matted and clumpy. It is not going to replace every pillow in the house. That is probably just as well. The point is not to manufacture a superior bedroom. The point is to take something growing in a wetland and discover that it can become something you use.
The first full-sized pillow I made took about 120 cattail heads. That number changes the character of the activity rather quickly. A pillow sounds like a simple project. One hundred and twenty cattails sounds like a harvesting operation. For a half-sized pillow, about sixty heads is enough, which is much more manageable, particularly with children. You find out how much material you actually need before you have committed yourself to filling an entire pillowcase.
Where you collect them matters. If there are only twenty or thirty cattails in a patch, taking sixty would be a fairly impressive failure of arithmetic. There are wetlands where cattails occur by the tens of thousands, and that is where the harvesting makes sense. The idea is not that you are going to destroy a wetland by taking a few dead heads. It is that the place should be able to absorb what you take without your harvest becoming the most significant event that happened there that day.
Getting into the wetland is part of the activity, particularly with children. Old running shoes work well. Rubber boots work until the mud decides to keep one. Sometimes you end up knee-deep in muck and water. Sometimes you don’t. Either way, I would rather have a child discover that being wet and muddy is part of being outside than grow up thinking that nature is something you can enjoy provided it does not get on your clothes.
I learned some of that from Martha Weber, who was taking community youth groups into the woods well into her late seventies and possibly into her early eighties. Martha was a wild edible plants expert and knew an extraordinary amount about what grew around her, but she also understood children. She wanted them in the woods, not merely looking at the woods. Her point was that if young people do not become comfortable with mud, water, plants and the general untidiness of being outside, it becomes harder to immerse themselves in nature later. There is a surprising amount of outdoor education that can be accomplished by allowing a child to get dirty without treating it as an incident.
There is also a useful bit of botany hidden in the pillow. Cattails grow from rhizomes beneath the muck, producing new leaves in spring and developing their familiar brown heads through summer. The heads from the previous year can remain through winter, but once they have opened, moisture can get into the fluff and spoil its usefulness. The best heads are still intact and brown, not green and not already blown open. You can test one by picking at it. If it immediately wants to become a cloud, you have found the right one.
Then comes the stuffing, which is where the project becomes considerably less tidy than the finished pillow suggests. The fluff gets into your hair and floats around in the breeze. Keep your mouth closed. When you pull your hand out of the pillowcase, some of the cattail seems to regard this as an opportunity to leave with you.
The other thing you discover is why this is not really a summer-camp activity for a hundred children. Sixty cattail heads for one small pillow becomes six thousand when multiplied by a hundred campers. There are not many wetlands where that would be a reasonable afternoon. With a small group, you can teach the harvesting as part of the craft: find a large stand, take what you need, move to another area if necessary and pay attention to what you are doing. With a large group, the arithmetic starts working against you.
That distinction is important in bushcraft. The skill is not simply knowing what can be harvested. It is knowing when, where and how much. The wild is not a craft store with an unlimited inventory. Sometimes the most knowledgeable thing you can do is walk past something you could use.
Still, there is something satisfying about carrying a cattail pillow home. A child has gone into a wetland, collected material, watched it turn into fluff, stuffed it into fabric and ended the afternoon with something they made themselves. A plant that had been part of the background has become familiar. Next time they see cattails, they may not see brown sausage-shaped things at all. They may see a pillow waiting to happen.
That is one of the reasons I like simple bushcraft projects. They give the landscape a little more vocabulary. Once you know what a cattail can do, the cattail is no longer just a cattail. Cat-tails have many other uses we will get to later.
Thoughts related to the Cattail Pillow Craft: great craft for ages 4+ is Episode 13 of the Reverie Nature Podcast.