Wands, a la Harry Potter

M found a cool website which featured how to make a Harry Potter wand.  I looked it over and it certainly seemed workable.  Now the site says that it only takes 20 minutes to make.  Well, that's a bit of a stretch.  Maybe its 20 minutes of hands-on time, but that doesn't include locating all the materials, waiting for glue to dry (several different times), waiting for paint to dry (again several times).  I would guess that our wands took more like an hour of my time, spread out over most of the afternoon.  But they really look cool!

This first picture is of an intermediate stage, where we put on hot glue to texture the wands.

I had the kids draw where they wanted me to put down the glue, but really they could have done it themselves (since I have a low temp glue gun).

M's wand.  It's really a little browner than it appears in this picture.

A's wand.  

In both cases, we skipped the "distressing wash" step of the process, since we had spray painted the wands black initially and enough of the black showed through the other paint to be equivalent to a wash. 

M wanted to take his wand to church this morning and show it off, but we dissuaded him.  Both kids did show them off to my mom and she was suitably impressed.