But so the item! I was talked into making it... how do we make it? Good ol' coathangers, the mouth-ring of my dragons, my very first chainmaille glove, the concept-stage of many a project, good ol' coathanger wire. YOU'LL be strong! And I can kinda poke through little pieces of that wire through the doubled coathanger for the upper prongs, pony beads for the coloured balls, aw yus it's coming together, thank you Bubz! And so a project was started. We took that coathanger, bent it into a mangled shape of thicker at the bottom and thinner at the top, and also made it somewhat small, so it would be able to fit into my waterproof sacks where I keep my card decks to keep them from getting musty in the damp English weather (with silca gel packets inside, I'm paranoid about these things getting damp lol). Yah, I didn't want a big, giant thing that's a pain to haul around and doesn't fit anywhere, I'll miniaturize it slightly to fit in with the rest of things. Once I hand that bent up coathanger to shape, I dipped the entire thing in glue to cement it all together, and let it dry.
We filled the gaps between the wires with some of the extra strips of fabric material from the minis box, and then dipped it in glue again to set all THAT into there solidly. When that was partially dry, we wrapped the entire thing in ribbon to press those strips of fabric closer to round, and generally bring me up to the point where, after it's dried rock-solid over the week, can be shaved and sanded to as close to round and smooth as possible. In the meantime in getting to this point, we printed off the instructions for this item in liiiiittle tiny text, and arranged that across three long, thin plastic sheets (double-sided), to match with the long, thin nature of the wand itself, which will be attached with a string to that loop we left at the bottom of the wand for exactly this.
And speaking of this, WOW, so that random cast page below (it's fun, give it a try :D), that was a bit of an unexpected challenge to make. So, because the different options have different odds (31-35 vs 65-68 for example), I had to make the random selection page 100 lines long, of course, but with only 18 results, meaning 18 result images, so I didn't have my usual xyz85.jpg numbering to go by, so I had to do each result one at a time, selecting the correct number of lines, changing them all to have the same wandofwondercastspell7.jpg for example, paste the result into the title text for all of those (and confirm it with the status bar line number), and then do the next result, just a lot different than my usual method for doing this. But we got it :D
That solved, after the sanding/shaving process, we filled in the remaining dents keeping it from roundness, glue-dipped that thing one more time, and then drilled holes between the doubled wire to make it so we can create those little prongs that come out near the top of the wand, which took a fair amount of time bending those little pieces of wire around, because I can only drill the holes at angles that go between the two wires, and since in the 3 and 4 prong parts, the holes are basically right beside eachother. So after much little bending (and for the 3-prong, just bending the 'empty' side up at 90 degrees and filing it to the thickness of the glue and ribbon coating), we actually succeeded in making all of the prongs line up, sit 90 degrees from eachother, and getting slowly smaller from the tip down (as seen in the picture in the book). Also, we made sure that the longest two-prong section will fit into a case much like the one I made for the scroll of titan summoning, since I wanted to both protect the prongs from getting squished in my D&D bag, and equally keep the prongs from damaging my books and other things in said bag.
So at the same time as making the wand, we made a case for it, using two wide-mouth iced tea bottle lids, and a coiled up plastic sheet for the body (the same sheets used as covers in my pdf printouts). And yes, made sure the prongs will fit inside the bottle openings, which will shortly be tipped with coloured beads to complete the look.
More to come!
Finished Month xx, 2025
Cast the Wand?
