Featured articles showing twice on index page

Hello,

First of all, this slider feature is great for highlighting content! I will be using that a lot.

I came across an issue/bug and I wanted to see if anyone could help me. When setting a post to Featured, the post appears in both the slider and the post list below. I would like to know if it is possible to not behave like that. A featured post would not show on the post lists, only in the slider. When removing the featured category, the post would move to the post list below it. Anyone know the approach to do that???

I am actually able to do this right now by excluding the category id from the page, but i can only add one item to the slider and not more than that. Code example in functions.php:

function exclude_category( $query ) {
    if ( $query->is_home() && $query->is_main_query() ) {
        $query->set( 'cat', '-32' );
    }

THANKS!!!