It is about time I posted about my daughter’s Harry Potter birthday party. The party was about 9 months ago! We had the party at home and through some creativity and planning had an amazing party that will be hard to beat for birthdays to come. I have posted the invite on here before, but here it is again. I created it in Photoshop Elements with a cool frame and owl from Graphics Fairy and fonts from DaFont.com.
The idea of the party is that the young witches in training were invited to participate in a magic workshop covering the topics of Ancient Runes, Divination, Potions, Herbology, Defense Against the Dark Arts, Transfiguration, and ending with a Field Trip to Honeydukes Sweets Shop. As mentioned in the invitation this all took place at Hogwarts Castle, which was disguised as a muggle home.
As the guests arrived they were given an Ancient Rune parchment puzzle. They used a rune code to decode the secret messages. They were also given a real magic wand. My father made these wands the same way a woodworker would make a staircase spindle. (I don’t know much more than that!) Each one was different just like in the books and movies. I stained the wands with a water based polyurethane/stain.
We set up my daughter’s room as the Divination classroom. She has a tent that worked perfect for our palm reading. The girls came in one at a time and had their palms read in the tent set up with dim lighting. I am no expert in palm reading! I looked up a few charts online and went from there. I think towards the end they were all getting the same fortune.
Potions class was set up in the kitchen. We combined glue and Borax to make slime. (There are a lot of slime recipes out on the Internet.) We also colored it with neon food coloring. To get their slime home we just put the finished “potions” in a zip lock baggie.
Herbology was outside on the back deck. No one was really operating this station because it was just a Venus Fly Trap with some facts written out about this carnivorous plant. No action required, just a stop on the way out to the back yard.
The flow of Ancient Runes, Divination, Potions, and Herbology lead everyone into the back yard. While those lessons were come and go as you please, Defense Against the Dark Arts was a group activity. We had a super scary black dragon pinata that the witches had to defeat. Once the evil dragon was slain Harry Potter stickers, glow sticks, and bookmarks came out of its belly.
While everyone was outside in the Defense Against The Dark Arts lesson, the Transfiguration wizard was inside setting up his show. We found a great magician for hire that even wore a full wizard costume. Every little witch-in-training had some part in the show. Obviously this was the main event and was well-loved by all the little girls and parents alike. This fantastic wizard, Tim Balaster, even made each of the witches a balloon animal during cake time.
While Transfiguration was taking place I snuck outside to the back yard to set up the cake table. We had a great Gryffindor cake created by our local bakery. I also made up some pumpkin juice which wasn’t bad; quite good in fact. (Search for pumpkin juice and you will find many recipes. I chose one that was juice-based and had some pumpkin puree in it.) After cake, the witches got to raid the Honeydukes candy bar before going home.
Like I said, it took a lot of preplanning but it really was one of the coolest parties we have ever done! I still hear about it from friends 9 months later.
