magic wands

Look out Ollivander, there’s a new wand maker in town!

I had so much fun making these magic wands!  Seriously the most fun and cathartic crafting I've done in quite a while.  Several months ago I started envisioning these wands and I picked up some cottonwood sticks that were downed during a windstorm.  Cottonwood is a very weak wood, but I was going for a magically, organic, Tolkien-esque feel, and their knobbiness was exactly what I was looking for, so I decided to risk it.

I used an exacto knife to make a V shaped notch at one end of the stick.  That's where the big chunky, colorful bead from my broken-costume-jewelry-stash got nestled in and then wired on with 16 or 18 gauge, colored, craft wire.

I wrapped wire up the sides of the bead as well as a ways down the stick, to really secure it and hold it stiffly in place.  I strung some small beads on 24 gauge wire and continued wrapping down the sticks with that and some other interesting textured fibers and colored wires. 

 J's wand (the blue one above) did get snapped during some fierce dueling, so we wrapped some gold fabric and some more wire and a beaded wire to strengthen it.

S wanted ribbons coming out the end of hers to show you the direction the magic was going.  I had some sheer ribbon and some more of those interesting fibers/yarns.

The handles were wrapped in the fibers or yarns and periodically tacked in place with hot glue.  The handle ends had a bead cap on or bit of felt or fabric wrapped around and hot glued down.  Then the yarn continued down and covered the raw edges.

And then my favorite part, a couple of knobs on each wand got transformed into bejeweled power-boosting magic buttons.

I hot glued plastic flat-backed gems on handy knobs and built up the glue over the edge of the gem and the knob forming a bezel.  While the glue was still hot, I sprinkled glitter on to hide the glue.  On AJ's I used an iridescent silver glitter that ended up melting in the hot glue and it looks like elven made metal in my imagination.

The kids and I have been pretty jazzed about these...at one point, I may have actually said that they were probably the coolest thing I’ve made since I made AJ, but I'm calming down now and just loving them on a more normal level.