Fair and wands

Today we went to a fair in a small town. It was somewhat dissapointing. There used to be a wonderful farmers market where I would buy handmade soaps, fresh honey, hand spun and dyed yarn and other wonderful unique handmade things. This year the farmers market consisted of two henna booths, on selling sunglasses, one selling shirts and the other few had all the same rings and necklaces that can be found at booths in the mall.

The carnival was very overpriced ($28 for a kids wrist band for that price I can buy both kids a wrist band at tinker town and have money left over). Despite all of that though we still had fun, the petting zoo was great, Drew is still "king" of the balloon darts, out of 6 darts he popped 5 or 6 balloons each time and ended up with all the good prizes. Aly got a henna tattoo and we bought enough tickets for the kids to go on two rides.

Here is me and aly on the Ferris wheel

Once we got  home and relaxed a bit me and Drew watched Dinosaurs (does anyone remember that old tv show? Not the mamma hee hee hee hee) and made Wizard wands. Both of the kids wanted one after our Harry Potter Marathon the other day.

Making wands is surprising easily, all you need is a chopstick (or however many you need) a glue gun and some paint.

First step as to separate the chopsticks, then you put a big glob of the glue on the thicker end of the chopstick. Wait a few minutes, put a bit of cold water on your hands and then shape the glue into a handle. Add more glue as needed to get the shape that you want. For Aly's I added a swirl the length of the wand and added some zig zags to the handle for Drew.

 

 

In the picture above you can see Aly's wand with the glue dried. It does take awhile for the glue to completely dry, once it has you can paint it. For the first coat I used cinnamon brown (just cheap acrylic paint). Once that was dry I added some random streaks of metallic copper to make them a bit more tonal and natural looking.

 

 

Here is a picture of both wands finished.

 

Just a warning though, if you are like me and have a child who puts everything in their mouths or picks at things then I would avoid adding the swirls etc... the length of the wand. I ended up making another one for Aly because while watching Harry Potter she sat and picked at the swirly parts (without realizing she was doing it) until she ended up peeling some of them off.