Wizarding Wands

Something you never knew and never thought you'd need to know:
photographing wands is really quite hard when you're fairly amateur.


As I may have mentioned, I joined Pottermore nearly a year ago as a beta tester. Boy, did it require a lot of patience to be a beta tester. Potions going amiss, no dueling, the purple screen of death... That's a story for a different time, though.


I was thrilled when I joined and was told that a) I have a 10 3/4" holly unicorn hair slightly springy wand b) I'm a Gryffindor. My last year has been pretty satisfying/entertaining knowing I'm a Gryffindor (I even have the sweatshirt).


So when it was time to do my wand, I knew I wanted to try making the right wand. Here's fun things about making wands:


a. The instructions we had were a bit too basic and crazy hard to use as is.
b. I had to improvise a lot.
c. Once you get started, you may accidentally make two (like me).
d. You probably want to use a large glue gun, not small. I did both my wands with a small glue gun and had a really hard time filling them all the way.
e. Be careful with how much paper you use. One wand ended up getting a bunch cut off because otherwise it was too bulky around. The other was almost not enough paper.

The green one is the one I tried to make look like holly. Funny thing about holly, though. It's very hard to find a picture of holly wood online. Go ahead, do a search for it. You end up getting Hollywood results. And when you get holly results, it's the leaves. I kind of ended up making up what holly wood looks like. Oh well.


I actually used an itty bitty crochet hook to make "unicorn hair" which I actually did insert into the green wand. The other wand has a glue core, which Ollivander probably frowns on.


I'd filled the wands literally weeks before I ever got around to painting them. My wands were well on their way within two weeks of me posting the challenge. Then they got stalled. Then I visited my mom. Then the wands were magically done!

And before you ask, there's a bit of viney bits going on, but mostly that thought didn't work out in execution. Oh well.

I don't actually know what I'm going to do with them now that they're all done. Truth be told, I misplaced them for a few weeks after I brought them back to my house. So until I know what to do with them, I'll leave them on my desk and see how far they travel around my home before I come up with a real idea for them.