Make a Wish

For years my children have wanted a wishing well. They've asked for it from Santa. They've wished for a wishing well. They've tried to talk me into buying one of those yard wishing wells at the garden center. So how happy were they when the Pooka Pages came out with their Ostara issue two days ago and there was an entire section on wishing wells, including directions for making your own? Over the moon.

First, may I just say how much we love the Pooka pages. She has so many fun seasonal crafts and stories. It's great. Especially if you are a pagan family. There was a rebus story, in fact, in there that Winnie loved. It's about Pooka the cat and his adventures. We read it twice and she was able to "read" many of the pictures herself.

Well, enough of the Pooka love, on to the wishing well construction.


As you can see from this picture, there are step-by-step directions in the Pooka Pages issue. First we took some of the sticks we had left over from our wand project from Imbolc. We used some cord to make cross pieces for the roof.

Then we glued the sticks to the side of an old (thoroughly-washed) tall sour cream container. She suggested using a clean tin can, which I think would work nicely, as well.

Next we took some polished stones from the craft store that we had left over from another project, and hot-glued them to the sour cream container. My kids wanted a sparkly colorful wishing well, so that is what we made.

We made two layers of them so they would look like a cobbled well, and cover the writing underneath. You could also paint the container beforehand to save on stones.

Then we loosely fixed a cross bar over the two side pieces with small pieces of cord, to act as a bucket wench. Loosely, though so our wench would turn and lower and raise the bucket. Our bucket is a lid from an old prescription bottle. We glued a jump ring on each side and tied more cord to them to make a bucket. Then we tied the bucket to one end of another cord and the other end of the cord to the cross bar. ta-da, working well.

Pooka pages suggested bark for the top, which we had, but it wasn't bendable enough, so we used a piece of cardboard instead. Angus and Winnie painted it.

When there was something that required me to do more of it (like the glue gunning) the kids colored the two well coloring pages from the Pooka Pages book. We read the story about the well before we even started.


Our completed well. We did the ritual outlined in the Ostara issue, and the kids have made several wishes already. They put some water in there, as no well is right without water. They keep chiding each other to be careful not to splash the magic out.

It is a rather overwhelming hit!