Is there anyway to raise particle Dupli Group off a mesh?

I’m trying to put feathers on a character but when I comb the hairs the feathers appear to be going though the mesh and leaving bald spots.

I tried ramping up the distance from .25 to 1 so the particle hairs would be somewhat elevated from the mesh but I still get the same result.

What can I do to get rid of these bald spots?

I don’t think there is a systematic way, except just doing more tweaking/combing until it looks right. But, maybe, could it be the feather locations are always off, relative to the hair location? In that case you need to move the pivot point of the feather object, e.g. by going to edit mode, select all, then move it.