Magician’s Magic Wand

Okay, wands, magic ones. This is easy: stick, paint, tape, glue, absurdly large mess caused by one single toddler, you got this!

You will need:

• Wood dowel - I went with an 18mm diameter and about 30cm long pine dowel (for those of you who use dark magic instead of science, that’s about a foot long at 0.7 inches diameter)
• Black paint* (I’m just using basic kids poster paint here)
• White paint*
• Masking tape (I’m using the ever so distinctive frog tape, other brands exist and work just fine)
• PVA glue
• Water
• Sandpaper (or a sander if you want to cheat)

*I’m just making the typical black and white magic wand here, you can choose whatever colours you like. Show me your blue and purple pride wands, show me your tiger wand, show me everything!

Grab that sanding paper, grab the dowel (can we just call it a stick? Let’s call it a stick) sand that stick! Make it nice and smooth, make sure you get the edges on each end, no need for them to stay sharp.

Honestly, I don’t know why magic wands seem to be always depicted as these black things with white bits on either end. If I had to guess, probably something to do with early black and white television and a need for high contrast. Could I google this stuff? I could. Am I going to?

You know what, this takes ages, but there’s way to cheat that are probably awful for the planet...

So you want to make sure those white ends are taped up, you can let some bits toward the middle stay exposed to allow our black paint to give a nice sharp line up to them.

See now it’s starting to look like a real mess, WAND I mean a real wand!

You might have a couple of spots of paint about, best give them a quick wipe down while that wand dries.

Okay, two parts PVA glue, to one part water, mix it all together and you’ve got some varnish that isn’t the end of the world if it gets in cloths or other things.

Just brush that varnish gloop all over.

Hmmm... looks like if we leave it flat, we’re not going to get a very smooth looking wand when that varnish dries.

Mwahaha, can’t beat us, Gloop! Wand meet pin meet clothes peg meet washing line!

I found I needed a few coats to get it just right but otherwise, leave the final one to dry overnight.

As you can see from this photographic proof, this wand was capable of making rabbits named Flopsy appear in mum’s summer hat* which she was very pleased with us using for a photo shoot.

*Your mileage may vary.