Potter Party Planning Part 3: Wanted Posters and Wands, Oh My!

It’s been a month (yes a WHOLE month!) since Logan’s Harry Potter Birthday party and I finally have lots more to show you all.
Along with the ties, Chocolate Frog boxes, and Bertie’s Every Flavor Beans boxes. I made a TON more stuff to outfit Logan’s party.

Wanted Posters!

I found these thanks to Google and printed them off on kraft colored card stock. See that one off the center? That’s a Logan wanted poster! I did that thanks to Warner Brother’s website! It allows you to upload a photo, enter the person’s name and gender, and then it creates a wanted poster of that person. Don’t think I didn’t download the wallpaper too!



Magic Wands

Unfortunately this is the ONE thing I don’t have pictures of and they were the most labor intensive! I could kick myself! I found several tutorials on line, but ultimately decided to make them out of wooden dowels and sculpy using directions I found in The Unofficial Harry Potter Party Book: From Monster Books to Potions Class!: Crafts, Games, and Treats for the Ultimate Harry Potter Party from Amazon. The kindle edition is now $9.99, but when I downloaded it, it was FREE!

Platform 9 ¾
I made this platform 9 ¾ entrance after finding a great idea here. I decided to use construction paper and paint though instead of wood to keep the party inexpensive, but I think it looks great, don’t you? The printable 9 ¾ sign came from dirtandsunshine.com. I just printed it, cut it out, and adhered it to the sign. The "brick wall" is just some plastic sheeting I found through Amazon in a brick print.


Missed Part 1 or Part 2? Click here to check them out!

Potter Party Planning Part 2: Chocolate Frogs and Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans

One of the more distinctive things most people remember about the Harry Potter movies are the treats associated with different scenes. The Butter Beer, Pumpkin Juice, Treacle Tarts, Pumpkin Pasties, and all of the yummy candies on the trolley on the Hogwarts Express train between London and Hogwarts.
To recreate this for Logan's birthday party, I turned to Google to search for ideas for fun party treats. I knew I wanted to do something creative but easy, and cute and memorable.

First up? Chocolate Frogs!
Remember the first time Harry saw a box of Chocolate Frogs and the thing jumped right out?

(image from http://harrypotter.wikia.com)

I knew this had to be one of the yummy goodies to include for the kids, and here is how I did it!

I first bought a candy mold from Amazon in a frog shape. The mold tray arrived, but I thought for sure it would have included instructions on how to do this! So again, I Googled it!

I found that I could just melt down a huge bag of chocolate chips, spoon it into the mold, refrigerate and PRESTO! Done!

After all the frogs were made (I think I've made about 30 or so, but I've lost count!) I set out to see if I could find a cute packaging idea; boy did I find one at ChicaandJo.com.

On their site, they offer a free printable box and the directions to cut and fold them on your own. It was remarkable easy to do myself and really makes for a cute addition to the Honeydukes candy buffet I have planned! Each frog was individually wrapped and put in it's own box for each of the kids. The rest will be individually wrapped and put out for anyone to eat or take home with them.

The completed Chocolate Frog and Box!

Next up was how to tackle the task of Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans. I remember a few years ago when Jelly Belly came out with a merchandise tie-in for the movies of selling their beans in the flavors, of snot, vomit, earwax, etc.
Yeah, not gonna go there...
Instead I decided to use the Starburst dual flavor jelly beans and package them up in a cute way too. Again, Google to the rescue!

I found the printable down load here and followed the directions to cut and fold provided. These were much more time consuming to do, as each window was hand-cut using an Exacto knife. I had seen the suggestion somewhere of lining the windows with acetate from the inside, but decided that with so many of these (10) it would be easier to just make individually packaged bags of jelly beans and seal them up inside.
Here you can see the process, and my little helper.

For the jelly bean boxes, you will need to cut a square piece of matching card stock to seal the box once the jelly beans are inside. The pointed top of the box was hole punched and tied shut with skinny red ribbon before putting the jelly beans in the box and sealing off the bottom.

Both of these projects were made easier by the use of sharp scissors and the scoring blade on my paper cutter. Just make sure the card stock you are printing these on is heavy enough to NOT be cut by the scoring blade... Trust me... learned that the hard way

More Potter Party Planning to come!


Did you Miss Potter Party Planning Part 1 or Part 3? Check it out HERE!

Potter Party Planning

It's Harry Potter mania in this house over the next week! Logan's 5th birthday party is coming up and I really wanted to do something special for him. I've been working on a few projects for the party, one of them being these Gryffindor ties.

Here's how I did it!

(click picture to make bigger)

Come back tomorrow and I'll show you how I made Chocolate Frogs and the boxes to go with them, as well as how I made boxes for Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans.