Disclaimer - this post has nothing to do with a renovation, if you find yourself in need of gruesome details of a laborious months-long transformation, this post is not for you.
Meanwhile, I have been feeling a little creatively stifled and I know the perfect storm: A 10 year old; having a birthday; loves harry potter. It was almost too easy. It took 3 days of labor - Day 1 was deciding what it needed and what I should do; Day 2 was buying materials; Day 3 was set-up.
This is Sara, my main B and lieutenant. Look how bad that b is! Here we were going to do a portrait of the fat lady for people to walk through but it was going to be a $250 banner and it was extremely pixelated. I was not at all sure that was a good idea, so I decided to see if they had one of those brick photo backdrops.
SPOILER ALERT: They do BUT the backdrop is only about 4 feet tall. It's like 100 yards long but the bricks... run horizontally across the 4 foot width. So I had to cut 3 big sections and tape them together to get a wall that looked normally-bricked. I suppose vertical bricks might have magical mortar but it wasn't authentic... we've all seen the movies.
That being said, I printed out some cool pdfs from
paper trail design and went to Michaels for a sturdy poster (make sure you get the foam kind so it doesn't bend while you're trying to have your photo taken) - use an exacto knife to cut the square space, cut out your letters and disclaimers, glue them onto the poster board... your work is done. I actually had a bit of spare cardboard from a length of burlap and was able to glue the prison number onto that.
I just googled undesirable #1 and Have You Seen This Wizard posters to tape to the wall of the leaky cauldron.
There was actually a leaky cauldron sign WAAAAYYY up there - I bought some thin wood from Michaels but I think something bigger would have served me better. In any case, I'll lower the sign next time - I don't think it got the accolades it deserved (also it is so, so far above the eye line of a 10 year old). Sara spent some time outlining bricks to get into Diagon Alley and we found a cool hide chair on which we put a golden vase filled with some light-up magic wands. The wands were apparently a great success - we got them from Party Boy. It was the only thing wizard-related they had during the off-season.
I wasn't sure what kind of food was being ordered (you do not want me ordering food for people - I will either get far too much or dismally not enough and either way everyone is mad), so I made a spread in case it was like tacos or something and they needed space to load up their plates. There was a moment when we though "let's make it like the great hall!" but then we had so many spooky props from our halloween stuff (I am, as you might imagine, the QUEEN of halloween), that it turned quickly into the potion master's dungeon.
This is about 6 pieces of cheesecloth, the aforementioned burlap (for a little added protection from food and punch) and some miscellaneous extras from the gift bags - a TON of glitter, keys, eyeballs, snakes, tiny cauldrons (read: leprechaun's pot), some bats you can shoot at each other, and lots of LED candles that REALLY need their batteries replaced. Alas! Time ran short.
Found the bell jar on SaveOnCrafts.com - it comes as a set and I once ordered 8 sets for a wedding and I made away with about 5 sets when it was all said and done: they are handy for SO many reasons, just go buy some you won't regret it. The crystal ball? I think the base used to be some kind of fancy fondue holder and the globe is from a broken light fixture - found them both at a thrift store for less than $6 for the lot. In fact all of the jars and creepy vases and candlesticks/candelabras were all from a thrift store at one time or another. Old crap is spooky, y'all.
I also made some polyjuice potion (punch) out of rainbow sherbert, ginger ale and some 7 up. I was told it tasted like mountain dew and got a ton of thumbs-ups. Potion labels I got at Michael's: I like to keep a couple on hand in case things need a spooky touch. I find they often do.
I got the idea for the owlery from
these adorable Harry Potter invitations - but as we had already sent invitations, I had to find a way to incorporate. Look at their dumb faces. I love them, but I have to credit them mostly to Sara. All her owls are beautiful and detailed with gorgeous side-eye. They are masterpieces. Mine were a little lackluster. She also went and got all the balloons for the entire spread so really this was her masterpiece.
Next to the owlery I made some decorative quiddich hoops from some hula hoops I found at Michael's (I couldn't find any that weren't damaged and the lack of proper roundness bothered me a lot). I hunted down brooms and had a tape party and when they looked like they would probably stay, I also taped them to the wall to make sure there wasn't an issue.
I cannot take credit for the snitches -
I found this great blog that executed something similar with golden snitches. All I did was buy a couple packs of those Ferrero Rocher chocolates and some white feathers - I like my snitches with streamlined wings, not fluffy ones, so I got the kind with gold tips. I took the ladies I work with over to Arne's and Kroger and we picked out all kinds of vaguely themed candies and I got the little place cards from Michael's in the wedding section.
The cake is Funfetti (just one box, I separated it into 2 pans) with White icing (buttercream and cream cheese icing don't always take the food dye how I want and I hate strawberry icing), some pink food dye, and one of those little nozzle-tip icing packs in green. For the nozzle tips - GO SMALLER! Even if you've let everything cool perfectly and the pink icing is rock hard - it is going to bleed. Look at that first "P" - it looks dumb because it IS dumb. Go with the smallest tip - it will bleed and look bigger later.
I also made Aragog's children - leftover spiders from Halloween. I had no idea we had so many, I must have been having a manic episode when I bought them all? That's my only explanation, I'm sorry. Anyway, I made them crawling out the door like they're scared of a Basilisk, it took some packing tape, a ladder, and like 10 minutes.
Last - I had a friend over the night before and we stayed up late and made 30 Hogwarts letters - they ALL have an address and they are all embossed with red glitter embossing powder. My embossing gun is my favorite tool so this was honestly my favorite part - I just got some off-white card stock from Michaels (not envelopes) and just drew the envelope fold on the back.
Also I let them borrow my driving frog, Trevor. He is named for Trevor and I became very attached to him during Halloween so he lives in my car and hangs out with me. I have explained him to dates as "hilarious" but if we're being honest... it's left the realm of joking for me.
All the books you see were changed at Halloween to be spooky (all the books were black or a dark color so we used chalk and added words to the titles on the spines) - my favorite was Summer's "Golden Boy (Soup)."
Apparently the broomsticks were a huge success like the wands. They were honestly meant to be aesthetic, I sort of figured 5 10-year-old boys would want to play video games and eat candy but evidently it was a cool enough setting everybody wanted to play with the brooms and wands and did not want to go play on go-karts because of the fun they were having. I teared up a little when I heard that. :)))
