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!