Harry Potter Birthday Banner

This is an easy but impressive project that we've used for a few different occasions.  For this one, I downloaded a free Harry Potter-ish font, and then surrounded each letter with a circle of dots in my Serif DrawPlus software (free download).  I cut out each circle, glued it to a bigger construction paper circle, and then strung the whole thing on grossgrain ribbon.  Cute, no?

Harry Potter Wands

For the Harry Potter wands, we used scrap paper, hot glue, toilet paper, and paint:


1.  Roll a piece of paper diagonally to give yourself a tight cone shape.  Glue the edge.  Cut the bottom to the length of your choice.


2.  After the glue dries, spray paint the wand the base color of your choice.


3.  Stuff the hollow inside of your wand with toilet paper.


4.  Use your glue gun and hot glue to seal the ends and add a "gem-like" effect on both ends.


5.  Use the glue gun to drag and drip texture on your wands, and then paint the raised glue the color of your choice once dry.

Harry Potter Sorting Hat

As promised, I'm breaking out some of our favorite projects from the Harry Potter party in January...

Here's our sorting hat.  I made it at the last minute - it took about 20 minutes total.

1.  I cut a ring shape out of a cardboard box for the "brim", and then rolled some newspaper into a cone shape.

2.  I secured the newspaper to the cardboard and itself with masking tape, which added more texture.

3.  Finally, I spray painted the whole thing with black paint and then a touch of brown paint.

Voila!

Edie's Harry Potter Birthday Party

Edie decided in October that she wanted her 10th birthday party to be Harry Potter themed.  With the new baby coming at the end of December and her birthday in January, we came up with most of the ideas before December.  (We got most of the ideas from other party descriptions online, and then added our own flavor.)  Despite this advance planning, however, I still did most of the work the week before, so these still count as last-minute projects.


I'll post the party description here, and then the cooler projects as separate entries.  My pictures didn't turn out great, but hopefully you'll get the idea...


We ended up with over 30 kids in our very small house, but it was still a blast.  AS kids entered, we put them through orientation, where they got sorted (by pulling a Gryffindor, Ravenclaw, Hufflepuff, or Slytherin label from under our Sorting Hat) and received their class schedule.  We had created 4 different class "stations", so we were able to rotate the groups through each station.  The classes were:


Divination 
(with my mother as Professor Trelawney)


The kids read a worksheet on palm reading and then learned their balloon fortunes.  (We created a bunch of silly fortunes, stuck them inside balloons as we inflated them.)  The kids had to sit on the balloons to pop them and then read their fortunes out loud.

Care of Magical Creatures 
(with my brother-in-law as Hagrid)


Barry taught the kids how to make balloon animals, and then they were given their own container of play dough to build a custom creature.   I got the play dough at Oriental Trading - they were Halloween-ish, and very much on sale.








Potions (with Lain as Professor Snape)
We let the kids make their own potions by mixing sodas and then had them do the classic pop rocks potion.  I found the test tubes (aka Mardi Gras shot glasses) at Oriental Trading.

Here's my potions display.  The picture doesn't do it justice - it was by far my favorite decoration.  I pulled a bunch of  images off of the internet and re-labeled the sodas.  After everyone had finished potions class we moved the sodas back up to the food table.








Transfiguration (with my husband as himself)
Tim taught the kids the toothpick star trick and a card trick.  Everyone got to keep a deck of cards for their goody bags.


After the kids finished their rotation of classes (about 20 minutes each), and ate pizza and cake, they were allowed to visit the Honeydukes sweet shop.  They received one galleon at each class, and then were allowed to trade their 4 galleons for 4 pieces of candy.  We found great candy molds at a local cake art shop, and made chocolate frogs, peppermint toads, and owl pops.  We also had cockroach clusters (chow mein noodles and chocolate), acid pops (dum dums rolled in pop rocks), Every Flavor Beans (jelly bellies), and licorice wands.

After picking their candy, they visited Ollivanders and picked out a wand.  I made about 30 wands the day before the party, in about 2 hours.


We finished with presents, and then the kids were picked up after about 3 hours of magic!


All in all, the party cost about $150, including food and supplies.

Yay for Blogging!

So here's how this started.  There have been many occasions in my life as a mother (especially when I was running my dance studio) that I would find myself looking for last-minute ways to seem fabulous with as little effort as possible.  I have been known to use a shoe as a hammer (who has time to go in the basement to find a tool) or a butter knife as a screwdriver (seriously, those 5 steps into the basement are a killer!), all in the interest of time-saving.  And sometimes laziness.


Now that I have the luxury of being a stay-at-home mom for a while, I figure I owe it to the world (and the "I just don't know how you get it all done" crowd) to share my secrets.  Most of the projects I do for the kids and their classes or scout groups are pulled from other blogs and websites - I decide on them based on expense, ease, and wow factor.  If it requires sewing or more than an hour to do, I'm usually not interested!


I hope some of you will find these ideas useful, or at least entertaining - I look forward to your comments!


Maggie