A Very Harry Party: Lunch and our ride

Whew – typing all this up is reminding me just how much thought went into this whole thing! But these last few things were really simple to do .

 

We ate lunch at the Leaky Cauldron:

 

Lunch was just simple with hot dogs and string cheese and apples.

 

I did do color changing drinks - you add a couple of drops of food coloring to the glasses before and so even though it’s all just sprite, they are all different colors.

 

We also had “Hagrid’s Cake”, which is a SUPER easy one, since it requires no skill to make it look like Hagrid decorated it!

We planned on going to a local children’s museum, so we of course had to travel by Knight Bus

(If you can’t read the writing, the first one says “Knight Bus” ; the second “just 11 sickles”; the third, “Just stick out your wand hand . . . .”;  and the last “Knight Bus *hot chocolate and toothbrushes extra.” The party was on a Saturday. We didn’t wash it off, and we had several kids at church the next day VERY excited about our car!)

 

Girly-Lou thought she had the COOLEST birthday ever!

A Very Harry Party: Spell Books

I was super excited when I found THIS link for these spell books. I  love it when the hard work is done for me!  But hers were formatted to be full page – I didn’t want to use that much paper. So I ended up reformatting them be half page size.
I had fun wandering around Joann’s looking for the perfect “book” fabric, and ended up with this fun stiff velvety stuff on clearance – so the whole lot only cost me $1.50 to make. The outside page I did with blank cardstock to add some structure, but the whole thing is just sewed together.  It’s a lot of sewing, but to make 8 books only took about an hour.

One trick that I learned back in my high school sewing class will help: don’t take the fabric out of the machine. Just backstitch, and shove the next book right up next to it. You’ll end up with a big string of books that you then cut apart later.


She also has a Magical Creature book, which I just added to the back of mine. I took my own pictures of “creatures” and just used descriptions from JK Rowling’s book “Magical Beasts and Where to Find Them.” and changed them a bit to fit.



We used these for our game later.
The day of the party, I gave the kids a few minutes to study the spell book for their favorite spells.

 

Then we headed outside to play the game.

Our Game: I hid the “creatures” from the book around all around – 1/2 in the front and 1/2 in the back.
The kids were split up into houses, and got to race to find their creatures first. To capture a creature, they had to locate it, read the description from the book, and cast a spell on it. Then they had to bring it back and put it in their bin.



Ravenclaw was the winner.  They had so much fun they decided to hide the creatures for each other while I got lunch ready.

A Very Harry Party: Wands

What’s a wizard without a wand?




I found THIS sign for Olivander’s shop.

 

I mostly used THIS tutorial for the wands – they really are easier than they look. I also looked on pintrest for some different style ideas.  It takes a TON of hot glue, and it took me about 90 minutes to make my 10 wands. They look really stupid before you paint them. But once they are done, the ROCK. I just spray painted mine with some dark walnut spray that I had.

Then I did a wash on them with either white, red, or green acrylic paint with water added.

My favorite were the green ones.




I also came up with the descriptions, such as “12 inches, rather springy, dragon heart-string core” for each one.

a Very Harry Party: invites

Of course, the first thing you need is to invite everyone!



I used THIS template for the owls – but I didn’t like the orange background.
So I some quick photoshoping.  I opened the file, and then dragged it onto a new transparent background. Using the magic wand, I selected all the orange and deleted it.  Then I just put a brown digital scrapbook paper behind it.  I printed them out (they turn out to be 5 x 7 size) and assembled.

I loved THIS idea of a secret message hidden in the typical Hogwarts acceptance letter.  When you wrote down all the red letters it spelled out “It’s ____’s birthday party”  I cut out the papers, crumpled them up, and then lightly rubbed a brown ink pad over it to age the paper.


You can find McGonagal’s signature HERE on the side of the article.
To assemble – I needed a really little hole punch. I didn’t have one, so I instead I put the owl page on a pillow, and shoved a thick yarn needle through the paper.

A quick easy little hole for the cute baker’s twine to attach the scroll.

I also printed the addresses in emerald green on the envelopes. (The font is called abermarle swash, found HERE)

A Very Harry Party

*this turned into WAY too long of a post, so I’m going to split it up over the next couple of days with all the links at the bottom of this post.

Friend birthday parties are kind of a big deal at our house. We only do them every 4 years – so we try to make them special when our kids get a friend party.

Girly-Lou is SUPER into Harry Potter right now, so she naturally wanted a Harry Potter Party (try saying that 5 times fast!) this year.

Now, there’s LOTS of stuff online for different Harry Potter stuff. I didn’t really do anything you  can’t find on your own, but I wanted to compile here all I did for ours.  Also keep in mind that you can make this as fancy as you want – but I did the whole thing for around $20! And Pintrest ROCKS for ideas (you can get most of the links on my board, here)

Every kid loves to get mail, so we sent our invites to their house:




Template link HERE.  How I changed it to come

When the kids showed up that day, first off we got our supplies: Wands and Spell books.



How I did them to come

Spell book idea HERE: The link is broken, but if you email her, she’ll get you the file with all the spells. 
Next we were sorted. 


*sorry about the picture. I didn’t have enough hands the day of the party!

I found THIS blog for the hat – it’s just a brown paper bag with the bottom cut off, and then twisted into a hat shape.  I held it over each kid’s head, said something about bravery or intelligence, and then sorted them into Gryffindor or Ravenclaw. 

We played a quick game


(details coming!)

Ate at the Leaky Cauldron too:



And took a ride on the Knight Bus to a local children’s museum to play.



Girly-Lou thought she had the COOLEST birthday ever!


Check out all the details:
invites
wands
spell books and game
lunch and ride

and linked up to the usual

My Favorite party

So my last post (where I was crazy!) I talked about filling those baskets with pretties.
Here’s the follow up.

Several months ago, one of my favorite blogs threw a Favorite Things party.  It’s kind of like when Oprah would have her insane giveaways, only for normal people.

I fell in love with the idea.  I’ve had it in the back of my head ever since, just wondering how to make it work.

Then, all of a sudden, I realized I needed to do it LIKE RIGHT NOW!!! Before school gets out for the year and before I have to worry about a little baby around the house!
So I made a list (and checked it twice!).  I sent out an email invite through pingg.com (LOVE that site!).  And then I re-explained it to pretty much every single person I invited!  Here’s my quick explanation for it.
“please bring 5 of your favorite thing to share with everyone else.  I’m also putting a price cap on it of $10 each item – but if your favorite thing is costs a quarter that’s AWESOME!!!”
The idea is that we each get to find new favorite things – and actually go home with our own goodie bags!  Adults NEVER get goodie bags!

My next problem was what on earth I was going to give! I finally decided to give one of my favorite books.  I hopped on abebooks.com (another GREAT place!), and found 4 hardback copies of Wildwood Dancing (a retelling of 12 dancing princesses) for a buck each! (ok, so there was also a couple more bucks for shipping, but still!) Perfect!  I placed them all in my cart and was good to go.

That is, until I got the confirmation emails the next day.  They all said expect to ship in 7-14 days . . . except for the one that said shipping can take up to a MONTH!!!?!?!?!??!  What! I only had 9 days before the party. If it was my idea to have this thing, then I think I better have something to give everyone else!
Which is why I had to get those silly baskets made. I really do love how they turned out, but boy, talk about crazy!
Fortunately, the night before the party the books arrived. It was cutting it close, but at least they made it!
We ended up with only 4 of us there.  My favorite thing was the book. One lady brought flushable wipes (I’ve always wanted to try those!), and the other two both brought foaming hand soap – great minds think alike!

I’m for sure going to have to do this party again!