Miracle Wand FAQs

What’s Miracle Wand?

Miracle Wand is the original DIY drapery wand craft kit and the ultimate window accessory!

You make a Miracle Wand by attaching our product to anything 3/8” around. We include wooden dowels with your order, and if you need more they’re available from any hardware store.

Miracle Wand works with all curtain styles – grommet, tab top, or rod pocket.

Round wooden dowels are inexpensive and available at any hardware store. 3/8” diameter wooden dowels are strong enough to use for opening and closing most curtains.

Why do I want drapery wands?

There are lots of reasons! You can reach over furniture, great if you have limited mobility. Great for little ones who want to close and open the curtains. They’ll prolong the life of your curtain rods by taking the strain off them caused by pulling down as well as across. They keep your curtain panels clean because you aren’t grabbing them with your hands day in and day out.

A drapery wand solves all these problems!

Miracle Wands aren’t just drapery wands. They’re an amazing way to dress up a window!

Does Miracle Wand work with grommet curtains? What about tab tops, or rod pocket curtains?

Miracle Wand works with tab top, grommet top, and rod pocket curtains right out of the package. Everything you need is included.

It will also work with some blinds, as long as the blinds can run freely on a track.

Your curtain rod can be straight, bent, curved, drooping, made of copper piping or bamboo or whatever else your imagination can cook up. It really doesn’t matter, since the wands attach to the curtain panel and not to the rod.

How do I attach it?

It’s so easy! Here’s a quick YouTube tutorial

To attach the dowel to the Miracle Wand cap: Put the cap on the dowel and tighten the screw.

If you have a tab top or grommet top curtain panel: Open the ring and slide it through the large hole at the top of the Miracle Wand cap, then slide the ring around the tab or grommet.

If you have a rod pocket panel: Add the clip to the ring then clip it onto the end of the rod pocket.

Don’t use glue. It isn’t necessary, and will make life difficult if you ever want to change the dowel.

How do I decorate it?

Here’s the fun part!

There’s no shame in leaving your Miracle Wands plain, and not painting them at all. They’re functional, and your décor might actually warrant them being left as is.

However, you can decorate them any way you like. Try that with the average acrylic drapery wand!

Any watercolor, spray or acrylic paint will look great. Same with stains and varnishes.

If you’re spray painting: Attach the cap to the dowel before you spray. Wrap some masking tape around the cap, use the ring to hang it up somewhere in a well ventilated area, and spray the dowel.  That’s it!

Kids love painting, and the same Miracle Wand caps will survive years of use. This means that when you want new drapery wands, just take the old dowels out and put new ones in. Presto! New décor!

You can also use decorative tape, known as washi tape, which comes in a myriad of different styles and colors. You can stick gems and jewels onto them as well, but you might want to attach a flat surface to the Miracle Wand first and the bling onto those instead of trying to glue them onto the round dowels.

How long should drapery wands be?

This is entirely up to you, but hardware stores sell them up to 6 feet long.

In the past (you know, before Miracle Wand), drapery wands were pretty expensive for what you got. Even acrylic wands are expensive, not paintable, and for a 4-foot pair of them they hover around $40-$60 depending on where you get them. So, cost was one consideration.

The other one is simply, how long do you need it to be?

If you have furniture that’s in the way, or if you’re short (Vertically challenged? Fun sized?), then you might want to use the full four feet of the wand. Most ceilings are 8 feet high, and some are 9, so either way your Miracle Wand will be almost halfway to the ceiling. That’s plenty long enough!

If you only need a foot or two, dowels cut easily with a coping saw.

Do I have to use the included ring and/or clip?

Of course not! How about decorative string or ribbon?

If you’re going to use string or ribbon, keep it short, no longer than about 4 inches. Pushing a rope is not easy!

What’s the difference between a drapery rod, drapery baton, drapery wand, wand pull, and curtain rod?

Most of those terms describe a drapery wand.

The “rod” is the bar that the curtains or drapes hang from. The “wand” or “baton” or “wand pull” is what you hold onto in order to pull them open or closed.

The rod holds them up, and the wand pulls them across.

What can I use besides a dowel?

Traditionally, drapery wands have been acrylic (hard plastic), fiberglass, or metal. Older ones of course were wood. So, think of Miracle Wand as back to basics!

You can make a Miracle Wand out of anything that’s 3/8″ around. Ski poles, pool cues, willow branches, copper pipe, what have you got? Dowels are cheap and they work perfectly, but they aren’t the only options.

What shipping method do you use?

We’re in a very rural area, but the UPS truck stops by twice a week. We ship every Wednesday and Friday.

What if the dowel doesn’t fit?

It depends what the problem is. If the dowel is too big, there’s a good chance it’s just swollen from humidity. Put it in the fridge for 20 minutes, and it’ll dry out and shrink to fit.

If it’s too loose, and you’re sure it’s a 3/8″ dowel, make sure you’ve got the screw all the way in. The screws look small but they’re completely efficient at holding the dowel in place for as long as you need it to.

As long as you’ve got yourself something that’s 3/8″ around, be it a wooden dowel, ski pole, willow branch or pool cue, you’ve got a Miracle Wand. We’ve tested these exhaustively to make sure that quality control allows for the odd size discrepancy.

Are dowels strong enough? What else can I use?

First off, dowels bend but they very seldom break. Most curtain wands will bend because that’s what a long stick will do, regardless of what it’s made of. However, if your drapes are extra heavy or if your curtain rod isn’t smooth, they will bend a bit more than you’d like.

How about putting some fiberglass cloth along the dowel before you paint it? Or maybe solve this problem for others, and let us know what you did!

We’ve mentioned substituting ski poles and pool cues and weren’t kidding, those will work when cut to fit (3/8″ around).

What’s Miracle Wand’s story?

Like all world-changing inventions, it was a solution to a problem many people had and nobody was solving.

One of our friends is just a titch over five feet tall. She lived in a basement suite with a window at the very top of her wall. On top of that, she had a table in front of the window because that was the only place it would really fit.

But this made opening and closing the curtains difficult. She couldn’t reach the top of them in order to close them all the way at night time, and couldn’t open them all the way in the mornings either. She wanted drapery batons but didn’t have a lot of money to spend on them, especially for 3-foot ones.

Wooden dowels seemed a great solution, but how to attach them to the curtains?

Some time spent with a 3D design program came up with the answer. We’re sure you’ll agree the solution is beautiful and effective. Da Vinci would be proud!

 

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