Making Harry Potter Wands

So hey, a little bit of a random update today. I didn't have this post planned at all but I thought you guys might be interested as it is book-related.

To give you a little background: To graduate, in Ontario at least, a student must have 40 hours of volunteer work by the end of high school so I do quite a bit of volunteering here and there. One of the things I do is volunteer at my library and attend meetings and supervise activities that they have on from time to time. So a few days ago, my leader emailed us and asked us if we would be open to help out on Wednesday for a Harry Potter wand-making workshop. I said yes, partly because it sounded pretty cool and fun and also partly because I haven't been the best at volunteering at past events and didn't want to make it seem like I was skipping out on everything.

So I went and it was really fun. The "children" were much older like in middle school so there wasn't a lot of supervising that needed to be done. Honestly I just spent the entire time making a wand of my own.

Here is a picture that I took of the wand. If you can't tell, I made a version of the Elder wand that Dumbledore used but it's not exactly accurate so it's like the Elder wand with my own spin on it.

My dad was quite impressed and my mom, even more so although I think that's to due with the fact she strangely thinks I am incompetent at everything. Which isn't so much annoying or sad as it is amusing. But anyway, I'm not a huge fan of it. I think it looks a lot better from afar but for something that I wasn't really trying to excel at, I think it's decent.

They're actually really really simple to make. I'm pretty sure these are the exact set of instructions my leader found on Pinterest. All you need are chopsticks, hot glue, beads and acrylic paint. The hardest part for me was to get the glue to stay on the chopstick. I consider myself pretty crafty with a hot glue gun after hours of gluing together popsicle bridges for my science fair but our glue was a little runny so it was quite hard to get it to pile on the chopstick without dripping everywhere. And it wasn't even hot, it was just very runny and sticky so a little hard to work with. Then I put little tiny seed beads on the individual balls to get that holey look that the Elder wand has and then I painted over it with some matte brown acrylic paint.

There were some neat wands that some of the kids came up with. I saw some Harry wands, some Hermione wands and even a Luna wand. Most of them actually worked with the plasticine which I think ended up quite well too but air dry clay might be even better because it's moldable and you can have a dry surface to paint over after.

So yeah, all in all I would consider our workshop to be a success! The craft was really simple and fun and creative so if you're thinking of something to do with kids at a party or something to do yourself when you're bored, this might be a good idea! And then you won't have to spend the thirty dollars or however much it costs to get a legit wand from Ollivander's! It's definitely a win win situation!

All right, that's it from me today. I just wanted to share with you guys this little bit of news. Honestly I had no idea that you could make DIY Harry Potter wands before yesterday so it was pretty cool being able to try my hand at it. Have any of you done this before or heard of this craft before? Leave me your thoughts!