10 & 1/4'', Willow, Swishy

Lily Evans' Wand - Wood turning Project

My Girlfriend is a massive Harry Potter Fan, so for her birthday I decided to make her a magic wand, based on the description of the wand of her favorite character, Harry's Mum, Lily.

There are lots of weird and wonderful prop replicas available, but as it doesn't feature in a film, not Lily's (obvs, if she'd used it on old no nose the story would be much shorter...yeah yeah horcruxes ...).

Mr Ollivander describes it as "Ten and one quarter inches long, swishy, made of willow. Nice wand for charm work." So with that brief, I set out to make my interpretation of what I thought a simple, but elegant wand would look like.

Willow is really hard to get hold of in sufficient sizes to turn down on the lathe. A walk down by the river sourced some standing deadwood but this has a habit of exploding as you expose old rot and woodworm.

Woof Tax

Wolfie doesn't mind the constant stream of rejected sticks though!

Luckily I have a scruffy looking Pussy Willow (fnar!) tree on my property which needed pruning. Its so voracious that it certainly doesn't mind a bit of pollarding even this late in the season.

This yielded about 5 ft of workable but very green timber that I cut into 12" blanks

I stripped the bark and brought it into the house for a date with the microwave defrost setting. At this point I had about a week to go so needed to force 12+ month seasoning process. Hey, willow is antiseptic so its practically steam cleaning!

Edit, lots of people asking about my knoife. Its an old Bison Bushcraft one-off made by Roger Harrington here in the UK, very similar to his woodcraft knife https://bisonbushcraft.co.uk/collections/available-knives/products/woodcraft-knife-1

The start of one of many attempts, still really wet wood.

The lathe is an amazon find, a Lumberjack SWL350. Bought to replace a dodgy bungie/pole reciprocating lathe used for small board game pieces. It has some really crap tools but regular sharpening has allowed me to get reasonably good at making what I see in my head appear in the timber.

Unfortunately drying the wood too quickly can crack the core of the blank. Green wood and my lack of finesse and patience on this one has caused some scruffy tear outs but its a rough shape coming.

And no photos later its almost finished. Careful skew on the driest blank then 100, 300 & 1200 sand paper (because that's all I had in the shop!). Just before I had almost pared off both ends i kept it in the lathe for two coats of light Danish Oil then a buff with beeswax furniture polish.

In the back is another attempt that had started to warp and overnight became a veritable banana.

It started to warp as I got thinner and thinner. Here it's chattering around during polishing, just before I cut it free.

Finished. I decided on embellishing it a little with a few turns of fine copper wire, held under a bead of superglue.

Lots and lots of 'polishing my wand' later, I'm pretty happy with the result.

The process

Every wand sold on Diagon Alley comes in a box, but nowhere on the muggle internet can you get appropriate sized boxes. But you can get card stock...

I think this is the same piece as the previous photo..

Anyway here's the box.

Now with labels, lazerjet prints of the fruits of my google-fu and a little messing around in good old MS paint.

I know the wand is meant to chose the witch, but she is pretty chuffed so think its been a successful match.

Thank's for looking!