Making Wands

Usually my husband, Bruce, does the schooling of our kids. However, now that I am done my law school finals and have de-stressed (a little) this week I have been helping him with ideas for our daughter. She is very artsy and enjoys making things. We have done baking and sewing but there is just so much of that a person can do before looking for some variety. So yesterday I signed up for Pinterest to pin the instructions for fixing my daughter's doll's hair and look for ideas for her to do.  Bruce pointed out that he had pinned instructions for making wands. We had planned to make them for school today. However, the kids were excited to start them, and we were unsure if we could get the wands finished today because of other plans; therefore, we decided to start working on them last night and finish them today. Once we got started on them, we were having so much fun we also finished them last night. We are all really happy with our wands and want to share them with you.

We started with chopsticks, small beads, hot glue and acrylic paint.I think if we do this again, we should have smaller beads and preferably ones that don't have holes in them. The chopsticks had a plastic wrap at the handle, which I took off before we started. The paint was mixed to make different colours for the wands - we used burnt sienna, black and yellow. Make sure you have a lot of glue sticks. We used quite a bit of glue.

 To begin, we used the glue to make our handles. We used some of the beads to make bumps and give it some texture. We also used just the glue to shape the way the handles look as well as to give the wands a rough stick-like feel to them. It was a learning process to know how long to wait before trying to mold the glue since if you try to mold it too early, it burns you and comes off the wood and sticks to your hand. But if you wait too long it is hard and not moldable.

Bruce used a lot of glue trying to figure out how to make his handle the way he wanted. About one glue stick's worth ended up in the garbage. He wanted to mold the glue to make it smooth. In the end he said he figured out that what he needed to do was put a really thick layer of glue on the stick and let the outer part of it cool until it was hard, then mold the glue on the inside which was still soft. I used the glue to make my wand look like a bumpy stick.

 After we had our glue and beads the way we wanted, we started to paint. However, there were still some modifications made with glue even after the paint was going on. Some of us decided that after our wands were painted, they didn't look quite the way we wanted them to. For example, my daughter wanted to put more glue between her beads because they stuck out quite a bit and still looked like beads. So she filled in some gaps with glue.

And my son didn't like the holes in the beads, so he took the time to (painstakingly) put little dots of glue in each bead hole. Personally I think his patience paid off because I didn't want to put glue in each of the holes of my beads, but I think his wand handle looks much better than mine.

Bruce painted his wand three different colours - one for the handle, one for the "stick", and one for the spikes - which are toothpicks he broke in half and glued onto the wand.

 As we were working on our wands, there were times we would poke them into a piece of styrofoam so that we didn't have to lay them down on the paper. Here you can see our wands in two different stages - mine is the unpainted one, and my daughter has hers painted. I used a risk piece at the end of my wand because it happened to be in with the beads and I thought it would be cool to use it since it was there.

The paint didn't take a long time to dry, but if you start handling the wand too soon after painting, you end up with fingerprints in the paint. And, as you can see, the colour of the beads doesn't matter because once you paint the wand, you can't see any other colour.

Our daughter works quite quickly on crafts (on most anything, actually), and since we had some toothpicks on the table she took the initiative to make a mini wand. It is the perfect size for her dolls - although she tells us that none of her dolls does magic. It may end up as a gift to one of her friends who likes Harry Potter.

These are the finished handles. The picture doesn't show as well the differences in the colours.

From left to right the owners are me, my daughter, my husband, and my son. We all really like our wands and, as you can see, they are each as individual as we are. 

While we had teased our kids that they needed to go find unicorn hairs  and phoenix feathers for the cores of their wands, we are still all a family of muggles with no real magical ability. We can continue being geeky, though. It was a lot of fun making the wands, and my daughter is already planning what she is going to do for her next one.

Homeschooling - we can do school after supper and have fun doing it!