House Cup

Before dinner, we tallied up the house points and presented the winner with the House Cup. The food was not Harry potter themed, but the dessert was Snitch ice cream.

It is Mango-Coconut ice cream, the wings are wafers, decorated with chocolate.

Photo Booth

Alyson made all the props for the photo booth:

There were spectro specks, a snitch, a copy of the Daily Prophet and Hagrid's pink umbrella. 

Hogwarts Scavenger Hunt

The scavenger hunt was a great success! I printed a Marauders Map and drew on the different locations, that we had created through out the house. For the first clue (the third floor corridor), I wrote a small #1 on the map.

The second clue was on one of the keys. It was hard to see, because I had written it very small and in pencil.
It said: "Where would Hermoine look?"

In a book, of course!
I had made this hollowed out book for Alyson as a Christmas gift.
It is a "Handbook of tables for Mathematics", that I found at a second hand store.(Alyson loves Math)
 At Christmas, it contained a lovely bracelet.
The clue informed the treasure hunters, that somebody had broken into Professor Snape's cupboard and some of his potions were missing. They had to find all six vials before he noticed the theft and blamed them. (Punishment: loss of all house points)

I found the glass bottles at Dollarama.
 The labels were free on line and I filled them with salt and sugar (dyed with food coloring).
 The lucky student, who found Felix Felicis (corn syrup and gold glitter), was awarded an extra 10 points!
When all potions were returned, they received the next clue: "How does a muggle get to Diagon Alley?"

Through the "Leaky Cauldron"

This quilt was one of Alyson's birthday gifts. I used the paper piece pattern from "sewhooked", but enlarged it by 250%.

The clue was pinned to the back.

It told the students, not to accept this illegal gift from strangers, while drinking in a  pub like this.

The answer is: Dragons eggs!

Hagrid kept Norberts egg in a cauldron in his fire place. We have a giant blow up cauldron, that was perfect for this occasion. I hid the eggs in there and added some red tissue paper.

The guest, then had to open the eggs.

With a hammer! (I will post the recipe for the treasure rocks later)

Inside the egg they found a tiny dragon and the clue:

"Not the post office!"

The last clue was hidden in the owlery, it listed all kinds of treats, that you can only find at Honey Dukes!

A visit to Honey Dukes was the surprise at the end of the treasure hunt.

Everybody got to fill a box with their favorite candy.

There were Chocolate Frogs, Acid Pops, Pretzel Wands, Cockroach Clusters and of course Jelly Beans.

Potions

This is the Potion Cupboard.
For this class, I prepared the jars before the party. I added blue food coloring to baking soda and put a small amount in the bottom, then topped it with white baking soda, so that no color was visible.

The Recipe was "Mandrake Restorative Draught".
The "Mandrake Root" is baking soda, the "Phoenix Tears" is vinegar and the "Dandelion Root" is baking soda (dyed yellow). 

The students were asked to add a small amount of "Dandelion Root" to the jar.

The potion became very fizzy.

To that they added water. 

The water dissolved the baking powder and turned the potion green.
One of the prepared jars contained red baking soda, so the potion turned orange (a sign of on especially potent draught). That lucky student earned an extra ten points.
The guests were duly impressed!

Snitch Birthday cake

This is the Snitch Birthday cake.
I baked two cakes in Bundt pans and stacked them on top of each other, to make a (somewhat) round shape.
The wings are cut out of waffle squares that I found at the Bulk Barn. The hollow space in the middle is filled with gummy spiders and snakes.The flavor is caramel, obviously! 

Herbology Class

This is Herbology Class.
 We painted Styrofoam cups brown, to look like flowerpots and "planted" Mandrakes.

We made the Mandrakes out of Crayola Model Magic and painted them brown. The leaves are green pipe cleaners.

The guests had to re-pot the Mandrakes into empty cups (we had a lot of Styrofoam cups left over from a school project!). The bottom of the (now empty) cup revealed  how many points each person earned. Additional points were awarded for the least messy job!!!

Divination Class

This is Divination Class.
We cut out flowers from paper napkins and decoupaged them onto plain cups. Then we added paper handles and gold paint, to make look like fancy tea cups.  The book is a free download from the internet and dyed with tea. I punched holes into the pages and bound them with a leather strip.

With glue, I painted simple shapes, like birds, hearts and so on (the shape in the right cup is supposed to be a dog) on the bottom of the cups and covered them with tea leaves. At the party, every girl poured out the excess tea leaves and revealed her shape. Then they looked up the meaning in the book.

The pages of the book came with the explanations, I just drew the images to match my cups.

Harry Potter Potion Drinks

For our Harry Potter Potion Drinks we removed the labels from different bottles and filled them with pop and juice.
We printed Harry Potter labels of the internet and glued them on.There was also a chart, to tell the kids what was actually in the bottles. Then we made up recipes of drinks, that they could mix, we gave them names like: "The dark Lord", "Love potion" and so on. The biggest hit was a jar of Effervecente, labeled "dried Pumpkin Slugs". It made every drink super fizzy!

Ollivander's

This is Ollivanders Wand Shop.
As everybody knows, the wand chooses the the wizard.
 So we had every guest pick up a wand and perform a simple spell. Using "Lumos" to light the candle in the background. If it didn't work, they had to try it with a different wand. (The candle is electric, I operated the switch with my foot.)

We made the wands, by rolling paper around BBQ skewers, added hot glue designs and painted them different shades of brown and black. We embellished some with gold or silver paint. 

Sorting

This is our "Sorting Hat", (actually a Bavarian boys hat from our last trip to Germany).
We placed it on the guests head and then pulled a house name out of a sock (Dobby's sock).

We printed the house badges onto sticker paper and had the guest stick them to their shirts.

Decorations

This is how we decorated the house for the party:

These are the flying keys we made, we attached invisible thread and stuck the to the ceiling with adhesive putty. This was the "the third floor corridor".

This sign was on the bedroom door, no entry allowed. 

This is where we collected the house points. We found the crests on line and glued them on to mason jars. The points are just coloured pieces of paper. The house cup is a plastic trophy, we got at the dollar store. It was gold, when we bought it, but to make it less tacky looking, we painted it black and the gold again. Alyson painted the Hogwarts crest.

This is the owlery, we'll explain later, how we made the owls.

"The chamber of secrets" (Bathroom)

Alyson's room

This is the Harry Potter Quilt, that Alyson made. The paper piece pattern can be found on "sewhooked".
Thanks, Jennifer Ofenstein for sharing your amazing patterns with all the "Potterheads"

Easter Bunnies

Here's a little Easter surprise for our friends at our quilting group.

We found the idea on http://www.sewcanshe.com/blog/
The instructions were easy and it was fun to make.

Party Day

Sorry for not posting these last few weeks, we were too busy preparing for the party.

But now hopefully we will have more time to share everything that happened at the party.

This is how it went down:

1. Guests Arrive
2. Sorting
3. Ollivander's
4. Drinks
5. Divination
6. Herbology
7. Cake
8. Potions 
9. Scavenger Hunt
10. Photo Booth
11. House Cup
12. Dinner

Flying Keys

This is the finished product.

We wanted to have lots of flying keys as decorations at our Harry Potter party. Since we didn't want to spend a fortune on a bunch of old keys we decided to make them ourselves.

We drew a key with wings on card stock and cut it out.

Next, we cut little slits in the wings to make them look like feathers.
Then we painted the key part brown.

One done, 29 more to go.

Epic Harry Potter Party

In a few weeks it will be Alyson's birthday. We decided to have an EPIC Harry Potter party. In the coming weeks we will post pictures of the crafts we are making for the party.

Have we mentioned it's going to be epic?