Kids Craft: Our Fairy Wands aka Zap Wands

A year and half ago K went to a birthday party where they made fairy wands.  Cute wooden flat butterflies glued to a dowel and they painted them and decorated them with gem stickers.  Maressa had taken a fancy to it.   So of course there is fighting over the one wand all the time.  So for a while now I had been promising we would make some fairy wands.

I got supplies I already had on hand.  Some wooden dowels, wood balls with big pre-drilled holes and acrylic paints.  I had the girls paint both the sticks and balls with the paints.  Btw, mini cupcake liners make wonderful paint cups.

Since I was using what was on hand, the holes in the balls where way too big for the diameter of the dowels.  To fix that I glued and wrapped a bit of tissue wrapping paper on the ends of the dowels once the paint was dry.  Just enough for a tight fit for the balls.  I pushed the balls over the tissue paper on the every end of the dowel.  Then we painted over the balls with mod podge glue and glittered them.  Then I coated the whole wand with clear acrylic spray to keep the glitter from shedding. Once they were dry we glued little paper flowers (I got them a while back at the Target dollar spot) at the top where there was a hole in the top of the ball. Once that was all done and dry we simply tied some pretty ribbons to the underside of the ball.

This project is good and bad depending on your child's patience.  It required layers that had to dry.  This is good for the child who wants to always be crafting (like my 6 yr old Kalla) in that there was something to work on for several days.  But kinda hard on the I-want-the-end-product now crowd.  ;)  Of course you can pre paint this project and use it as a party craft to decorate them.

Regardless the girls enjoyed making these together.  Oh and they actually use them to zap each other.  Yep, Dora princess movie.  ;)