Darcy's Journal: Harry potter

Owl Post delivering the birthday invitations.

I Googled images of owls until I found one I liked. I liked this since it had no color and I could only print in B and W, plus Harry's owl, Hedwig, is white. Before gluing the owl onto the construction paper I snipped out the background right under his talons, so his tail feathers wouldn't show when "holding" the scroll.

Once glued I made two snips through the owl and construction paper to make a slot to put the scroll in.

I found these invitation templates online here:

http://birthdayprintable.com/?p=2613

We cut them out, rolled them up and tied them with yarn. The scroll was then put in the slot so it looks like the owl is holding it.

The sorting hat and magic wands.

The sorting hat is just a witch's hat stuffed with tissue paper.

Magic wands.

The wands are chop sticks with hot glue kind of hap-hazardly put on for the handle. Once dry we decorated some of them with a spiral or dots or lines down the sides. Once dry again, painted with acrylic paint. When the paint was dry I coated with a little varathane, but it took the paint off in some places. This step isn't necessary. The paint left a very matt finish, I just thought a shinier finish would be nice and I had varathane on hand.

There is a tutorial here: http://www.grosgrainfab.com/2012/06/diy-harry-potter-style-wands.html?utm_campaign=Feed:+blogspot/grosgrain+(Grosgrain)&utm_medium=feed&utm_source=feedburner&utm_content=Google+Feedfetcher

Candles floating over the table in The Great Hall. You can also see a witches robe hanging in the background.

Another view

I made these with toilet paper rolls, hot glue and tissue paper. I put hot glue for the drips of wax and then painted them white. Tissue paper for the flames. I put 3 long lines of fishing line from the cabinet to the door frame using clear thumbtacks. I hung each candle with fishing line from the long lines. I have very old plaster ceilings and I did not want to make holes in it to hang each candle. This gives them same effect with minimal and well-hidden holes.

Here is where I got the idea: http://www.thiscallsforaparty.com/harry-potter-party.html

I made these mermaid tails with scraps of material and just hot glued them together instead of sewing. Since they are just for decoration they didn't need to be very robust. I put a blue sheet in the bottom of the bathtub for water.

I drew it, Darcy colored it. LOVE it!!!

Source: https://goo.gl/images/OMEKTQ

Sirius Black photo props. The main part of the frame was actually the bottom of the box Darcy's bird cage came in and it already had that hole cut in it. I added a piece of cardboard at the top to out the writing on.

I googled the image from the movie and copied it.

Loot bags have Harry's school tie on it. I used red construction paper and cut out the shape of a tie. I cut strips of yellow construction paper to make the stripes. The final touch a white "collar" at the top.

Darcy asked for tiered cake, I said sure! Then I thought about it...can I stack boxed-cake-mix-cake that high? Well turns out as long as it has support, you can stack any cake! Kevin helped me cut a tiny dowel into pieces and we put the pieces into the bottom layer cake to support a cardboard cut just the right size for the next layer of cake. We did same thing again with the next tier. The cupcake is just sitting on top with some icing as glue.

The bottom layer is standard 8" cake pan size. The layers were dyed red and yellow to represent Gryffindor. For the next layer I used an oven safe dish that I had that was about 6.5" diameter. I only had the one dish, so I had to bake each of the 2 layers separately.

Here you can see the middle layer (~6.5") and the cupcakes I made with the left over batter.

The top layer (under the cupcake) was baked in 2 onion soup bowls. I used one cake mix for each tier (2 layers per tier) and I ended up with nearly 2 dozen cupcakes from the left over batter (6 from the middle tier and about 16 from the top tier). I filled 2-3 cupcake more than 2/3 full so I would get one with a really domed top to top-off the cake.

The finished cake.

In order to turn white icing red it took nearly a whole bottle of red coloring, which made the icing runny.

Witch and Wizard parking

Some of our decorations.

Strike-the-lightning bolt game. I hot glued cups onto a piece of cardboard cut into the shape of a lightning bolt. Each cup had a small prize in it like chocolate, costume jewellery, plastic spiders, etc. The witches and wizards used their wands to strike the cups and retrieve their prizes.

Platform 9 3/4 (The Platform for witches and wizards to get the Hogwarts Express)

Darcy and I used an old white sheet, sponges and red paint to make Platform 9 3/4. We had this brick wall painted in about 15 minutes. For the muggles reading this, to enter platform 9 3/4 you must run through the brickwall between platforms 9 and 10.