Our Harry Potter Birthday Party

To start with, let me show you the magic wands we made.  We made enough magic wands for all the children attending the party.  When they arrived we had a wand ceremony where each child reached under a black cloth and chose a wand unseen, after all the wand chooses the wizard!  I also handed out print outs of the Standard Book of Spells which I downloaded from here.



As you can see below, we had a wide variety of shapes and colours. It was a lot of fun and a great school holiday activity leading up to the party.


Next up, lets look the the food we prepared.  This is the cake I make - Hogwarts Castle.  I was pretty chuffed that I was able to reuse the Wilton Castle Cake parts for the turrets that I had used for my daughters cake in January.  I baked five cakes to create this version of the Hogwarts Castle - but we did have 30 kids there plus parents, so we needed it.  There was chocolate cake, vanilla cake and caramel cake, which seemed to be perfect for everyone.  We used my sons Lego creator train for the Howarts Express.


The table was laden with lots of food, both healthy and treats, and a few signs and some fun decorations made the spread quite impressive.


The butter beer looked so real, yet all it was, was a pineapple juice and dry ginger ale fruit punch.




Another craft activity we undertook during the school holidays before the party was painting an old sheet with a brick pattern. We hung this at the archway entrance to our house, cut a strip up the middle and placed a 9 3/4 sign next to it.  This really set the scene for the day (and guests certainly knew they were at the right house).  The kids enjoyed walking through the wall to get to the door.


We went to lots of effort with the party lolly bags too.  The kids went for a walk out in the reserve next to our house and found a range on sticks.  We then used brown paper bags cut it to look like broomsticks. My mum spotted this idea on pinterest, and while they looked amazing, they probably took a lot longer than we were expecting to prepare.



The main activity that we did for the party was a potions class.  I set it up under the outdoor entertaining area out the back, where we had several tables for the kids and a table set up with all the potion ingredients.  I bought some cheap jars and bottles from the dollar shop, and printed my own labels for each of the ingredients. Here are jpgs downloads of my potion labels 1 and potion labels 2.


We did a total of 5 potions, and the kids had so much fun.  I gave each child a potions book to take home which had the details of all the potions we mixed.  They were mostly mixes of bicarb soda and vinegar and food colouring, and were a combination of various potions that I found across the web. Here is a PDF of the potions handbook I wrote for the party.

Below is the result of the 'Exploding Elixir' one of the kids made.  They loved how it frothed and foamed outside of the cup.


We also used fake snow and mixed it with coloured water, which I had pre-prepared into plastic test tubes.  Everyone grabbed two colours, and then poured it on the snow and swatched their snow grow in a new mixed colour.




Finally we made glitter slime, which we called 'Rainbow Rubber Rocks'.  This is just your classic slime mixture made with Elmers Clear craft glue and borax.  Every child had a text tube with about 2 teaspoons of glitter.  I had a whole bunch of different glitters laying around from my polish mixing, and many of them were not solvent resistant, so they were perfect for this.  Everyone got a different glitter colour combination, there was lots of holo glitters in every colour of the rainbow.

Here is my daughter getting her hands dirty making her glitter slime.


I actually had so much fun with the glitter slime that it's not even funny.  Naturally I made sure I got a gold mixture of glitters for my demo to the kids how to make the slime.  Here are some photos of what it looked like.  Plus it lasts for weeks, and I am still playing with it now.  I find it very relaxing to play with, it's just like that Thinking Putty you can buy.



Look how stretchy it is too.  I could cover my whole hand in gold holo glitter.