Hello everybody! This forum has been in hibernation for a while now, so I just wanted to share some of the wands that I’ve been working on lately. I’m pretty excited about this batch because they’re all made from various types of exotic woods. The first three are wands that you’ve already seen before, but I’ve since improved on them:
Harry Potter
I showed this wand in a post a long time ago, but at that time, the shaft was simply painted dark brown. Since then, I’ve managed to scrape off all the paint and I’ve stained the wood instead. This wand is made from real holly, so it was pretty difficult to get the white wood to be dark enough, but I’m pretty satisfied with the end result. Now it looks more natural because you can actually see the grain and there are one or two little knots in the wood as well.
Bellatrix Lestrange
I essentially did the same thing for this wand that I did for Harry’s wand. The last time I posted pictures of this wand, it was painted the same shade of dark brown. While I liked it painted, it just didn’t feel right. Bellatrix’s wand should be more organic and cracked and wicked-looking. So to that end, I added a few more carved in details to age it and I ended up staining it. This wand is holly as well, so just like Harry’s, getting it to be so dark was another battle, but I think it turned out really well. There are also a couple knots in the shaft of this wand as well that really add to its overall look.
Fred Weasley
I started this wand a couple months ago or so, but I finally got around to finishing it. It’s made of East Indian Rosewood, and it was easily one of the most time-consuming wands I’ve made to date. I started with this wand on the lathe, but there was a TON of hand carving because the only way I could get the necessary detail in the handle was with my carving knives. In addition, the pegs on the shaft of the wand weren’t carved and then glued on, instead they were actually carved to be a part of the shaft. So this wand might look like it would be kind of fragile, but it’s actually surprisingly strong. I’ve even dropped it a few times already, and nothing has broken off or chipped or anything! It’s one of the more unique wand designs out there, and for that reason, it’s one of my favorites.
Filius Flitwick
I made another version of this wand a long time ago, but it was so much fun the first time, I had to give it another shot. I’m a huge fan of this wand because it’s so deceptively simple. You look at it from a distance and it looks pretty plain, just like a straight shaft. But when you look at it up close, you really get a sense for how elegant it is because it has a lot of subtle curves and contours. It really took a lot of careful work and a lot of time to carve the fins into the handle, but it was absolutely worth it. I chose brown ebony for this wand because I wanted it to be really strong, and have a nice weight to it, and the end result is just awesome. In fact I’ve come to think that if I were a wizard, this would probably be my wand because it’s understated and practical, but it also has a unique flair to it.
Pomona Sprout
I made this wand essentially just because I wanted to see what Lignum Vitae was like. In fact, whenever I put this piece on my lathe, I didn’t necessarily have any plan for which wand I was going to make; I just kind of kept turning different designs into the wood to see how workable it was, until it got thinner and thinner and so I ended up shaping it into what you see now. I’m not sure how well you can see in the picture, but the handle has also been roughed up a little to make it look more organic. I really want to use Lignum Vitae again in the future because it was just so different from anything else I’ve used. It’s VERY strong and heavy, but it turned incredibly well because of how oily/waxy the wood was, and it has the best smell ever - it almost smells like some kind of spice, but I can’t quite put my finger on it. I also found out that one of the coolest things about this wood is that it darkens with time (and sunlight, I think) and gets a greenish sort of petina on it. So in the end, this wood ended up working really well for Professor Sprout’s wand because you could really see someone carrying this thing around and working in the garden with it.
Minerva McGonagall
This wand was pretty simple to make because it was made entirely on the lathe from a piece of bloodwood. Even so, I like this wand a lot because it really shows off how beautiful the grain and color of the wood are. This wand has just the right weight to it, and the design of the handle makes it fit really comfortably in your hand. To finish this wand, I really wanted to have it tipped with a crystal. In fact, I was specifically looking for a piece of amber because if you watch The Chamber of Secrets, the crystal tip seems to have that type of an orange cast to it, instead of just being clear like the Noble replica. So far though, I haven’t been able to find anything that’s just right, so for the time being, I made a plain tip out of holly for this wand.
Parvati Patil
I don’t say this very often because wood carving is usually a very calming hobby for me, but this wand was an absolute nightmare to carve, lol. I chose osage orange based more off of the stock photos for this wand, which seemed to be more orange than brown. I had never worked with osage orange before, but it was a lot harder and heavier than I thought it would be, which made it extremely difficult for me to work with. What’s more is that this wand has a very unique shape that requires you to have a very specific plan for how you’re going to carve it. So the process of making this wand was very painstaking. That being said though, I am pleased with the way it turned out. It fits really well in your hand because your fingers wrap around it right along with the dragon wing. Additionally, as I said before, it is a pretty hard and heavy wood, so this wand has a good weight to it, and it’s very strong and sturdy.
Death Eater Snake
I recently completed this wand and I’m really happy with how it turned out. I didn’t really like the design of this wand when I first saw it, but it’s grown on me. However, I should point out that this wand is sort of a combination of the Noble replica and a replica that is sold at the Universal Studios theme park because I purposely didn’t make the skeleton white, and I didn’t include that strange bone that goes from the mouth of the skull to the rib cage. I chose brown ebony for this wand because I really like the heft that it has and I like the fact that it sands so smoothly that you can actually get a good polish on it. This wand is a little thicker than the others, but it’s still really comfortable to hold, and the engraved scales that twist down the shaft feel really cool under your fingers.
Hermione Granger (from the first two movies)
This wand is sort of special because it was really the very first wand that we ever saw. I remember WAY back when the first trailer for The Sorcerer’s Stone came out, it had a short snippet of the Charms class scene where Hermione levitates her feather. And just for a second or two when she gives Ron that “I told you so“ look, you could kind of see that her wand had a dark shaft and a light handle with some kind of a knob on the end of it. It was after I saw that trailer that my twelve-year-old self first picked up a knife and started whittling wands from sticks I found in our woods. Later on, when the first movie was just coming out on dvd (the first dvd I ever got!), I got my hands on a clear picture of her wand in a sort of promotional pamphlet for stores that would be selling copies of the movie, and you could see that the shaft was dark brown with an almost purple tint to it, and that the handle had some strange knotted grain to it that I didn’t recognize. Over the years, I realized that the knotted grain had a name of it’s own, “burl,” and that not all woods need to be stained to be that dark color. So just a couple weeks ago, I came across a piece of cherry burl that my uncle had given me probably five or more years ago, and I when I combined it with a piece of rosewood, I was finally able to complete this wand! Now that I've made it, it feels like everything has kind of come full-circle
I hope you enjoy seeing these wands as much as I enjoyed making them!
