Last year for my daughter’s 9th birthday I wanted to make her something special she would not expect. Before we moved house our garden had an Elder tree growing behind our shed, we never really made much from the Elderberries growing on it but it often needed some of its larger branches to be pruned, usually because the branch would no longer grow leaves and was visibly dying. But this wasn’t my first choice of material to do this project.
I spent a long time trying to source the right material for this project. I thought of going out in the woods (in March after a big snow storm, it wasn’t gonna happen), I even went looking for something suitable in a pile of big old logs strewn about in a clearing up from work, but I couldn’t find anything suitable.
As luck would have it, the branches I started to prune from the Elder tree were perfect. I knew we were in the process of moving out and this would make a nice memento from our old place and as it turns out, Elder is a really nice wood to carve (I will do a further post on a more recent project I did with Elder).
I cut a bit of the branch at roughly 30cms (that’s 12 1/4 inches for you Potterheads) and after removing the bark, I started to rough-shape it with a rasp.
The difficult part in shaping the wand part was to find just the right thickness. If it was left too thick it would just not be believable. If it was too thin it would risk becoming too fragile. In the end I think I found a thickness which works, though perhaps I could have shaved off a bit more towards the bottom.
I have to say shaping this project with the rasp was oddly satisfying. I don’t really use that word much as I think it tends to be unnecessarily mediatised on social media but in this case it was a nice feeling to shape it this way.
Now the handle itself was roughly shaped to its final thickness, in a way that would sit comfortably in the hand and then I traced a really quickly made up design to cover the whole surface and give it a more interesting and unique look. I had to fill some cracks in the stubs of protruding sub-branches that had been cut off with epoxy just to stabilise it. It was such small cracks that 5min epoxy did the job just fine.
The bulk of the carving was done with my Dremel and probably the wrong type of carving bit. I haven’t quite worked out the best way to do power carving efficiently but in this case it was good enough for my needs. I then spent a lot of time to scrape the inner surfaces smooth with the tip of a knife. After that, a lot of sanding and a couple of coats of spray lacquer and it was ready to give as a present.
So yes, it is an Elder Wand, even if it isn’t the Elder Wand 🙂
Since the wood had started to decay there are some traces of spalting in it which give it some interesting contrast to what is otherwise a very light wood. All in all, a project I am quite happy with. Next time I’d love to try another wand with yew, I love the contrasting colours in this wood.