How to Make a Wooden Wand

I recently got a comment asking if I was going to make an instructable showing how I make the wands that I sell. Well this is it! I will show you how to turn a wooden wand on a lathe! I will, however, say in advance that this is a bit hard to do so I hope you have a lot of patience.

You will need the following:

A log or square block of wood (I chose willow).
a lathe.
a few chisels to carve with.
some sandpaper (I used 300 grit, 180 grit, and 80 grit.)
a hack saw or an extremely fine toothed saw.
wood stain (I used english chestnut, but you could use whatever you want).
lacquer or varnish (optional)
2 old rags or 2 paintbrushes that you don't mind getting destroyed.

Get your log or block to a point that it is a nice cylinder on the lathe. Do this by taking a gouge chisel and carving it down.
Now make to lines on the wood to show where the ends of it are. To make the lines, just drag a pencil where your line will be and do the same on the other end. I made my wand 12 and a half inches long.

Now you're going to want to start to chisel down your wood so it starts to take shape. My wand design is a straight shaft all the way down to the end where it meets a bulb-like shape. You could use a detail chisel to start to get that basic shape.

The problem I'm talking about is the fact that when the wand's shaft starts to get thin it could very easily snap or break in half. To prevent this from happening, you could do what I like to call "spindling". To do this you can put on a glove and put your hand on the wood while it's spinning. Grip it loosely and carve the rest of it down using this method. This will reduce the pressure and the chances of the wand breaking.

Now you can completely carve the wand down to your desired shape. Just keep on using the spindle method because wands have broke on me before when it got to this point.

Next you could sand it down. Start the sanding with your roughest sandpaper then go down to your middle sandpaper. Now finish the sanding with your softest sandpaper. By the time mine was finished sanding it looked like resin!

Now take the wand off the lathe and cut the two ends off the end chunks of wood. You might want to sand down the ends you just cut on the wand now.

Now you can stain your wand. I used an old rag to rub on my stain. Wait for it to dry. Now if you have varnish or lacquer you will want to put that on right about now.

VOILA!!! Happy Selling!