Pretending to be Ollivander

Last night, in preparation for Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2, my friend Jennilyn and I spent nearly four hours making wands for our characters. My husband just sat on the couch, preparing his D&D encounter, incredulous. Let's just sum it up by saying that Ollivander's job is much harder than I imagined it would be!

We started out with some plastic pipets that my husband brought home from work. He's a research scientist, and these pipets are pennies each, so this was his way of supporting us in our fandom. By painting, taping, and hot gluing, we were able to take these clear tools of biology labs and slowly (very very slowly) turn them into the tools of witches and wizards (albeit without the dragon heartstrings or unicorn tail hairs inside).

Walnut got curious about what was going on.

Things got a little crazy as we got more into it.

Finally, after all the paint and glue dried, we were able to Sharpie in our design details. This morning I also added some dark glaze to the wands so that they would look more dark wizard-esque. Here are the final results!

Top: Nymphadora Tonks; Bottom: Cedric Diggory. Jennilyn did an excellent job with some challenging wand shaping.

Top: the Elder Wand! The nodules, which are meant to be clusters of elderberries, are made of hot glue. I did consider making Voldie's original wand, but the crazy shape at the end defies masking tape. Bottom: Bellatrix' first wand, which she loses to Hermione.

I think the dark glaze really makes a big difference.

I also finished my corset yesterday, which I'll hopefully show tomorrow. It was definitely a trial-and-error experience, trying to draft one from scratch! Now I just need to figure out how to get the white streak in my wig, then make a Voldemort robe for my husband, who so graciously agreed to accompany me as the Dark Lord.