Crafty Banner-Making

So as I explained previously, I'm not very crafty. But no more! I have unleashed my inner pritt stick goddess and made these:

This project took me maybe an hour and a half? Not very long, although I started it in the morning and then had to go feed my mum's cats, and on the way back there was a thunderstorm so we drove around watching it.... so it didn't get finished until the afternoon.

Here's how it started!

I got the black paper, which isn't used in this example but will be used on a copy of today's work, from W H Smith's for around £1 each I think. The pritt stick and scissors I already had, and we had some leftover coloured card at work which luckily matched the colours I needed: red, yellow, blue and green.

I printed out each of the house crests onto A4 paper. Be warned, Slytherin especially looks very pixelated when you look at it on paper and up close, but I found if you stand back from it (and since I'm planning on hanging mine over a balcony, that made sense) then they look fine.

To make the rectangles of card look more like pennants, I cut a triangle out of the bottom.

To get them all the same size, I cut out one and then laid it against the others one and by one to mark where the top of the triangle came to. Then you just cut from the corners to the dot. Keep the triangles for later.

Cutting out the house crests was easy enough, until I did Ravenclaw. Fiddly! The wings of the raven jut out the top of the crest and created about as much cutting work as doing the other three crests together.

Those triangles now come in handy! I wanted to glue all the way up to the edges of the crests (especially on bloody Ravenclaw) but equally did not want glue on my table. So I used the leftover triangles as surface protectors.

To make sure they were all glued into roughly the same place on each pennant, I used a DVD case as a placemarker.

And behold.... the finished products!

I am veeeery happy with these, and plan to hang them over my bedroom balcony so that the first thing people see when they come in, aside from the floating candles (more on that another time) will be these hanging up.

My Saturday feels very productive :)

Getting My Craft On

I'll be the first to admit, I'm not usually the girl who makes everything by hand and can sew a button back on a coat with her eyes closed. I can barely tie my own shoelaces. Fabric scissors are both fascinating and deadly - I am not a naturally crafty person. Unlike my mother, who made a variety of costumes for me when I was a child, including a little mermaid costume with detachable tail. She has a sewing machine and everything. I have ebay.

Yes, generally I buy what I need. It's normally far better quality than whatever I could dare to make myself. However, there are some things you can't buy, such as signs for around the house that say things like 'Aragog's Lair'. Or a Hogwarts scoreboard, in the absence of reliable way to keep scores using hour glasses (damn you, magic).

So on Sunday I went and traipsed around the shops - I walked the entire length of the shopping centre in an hour and didn't find everything I wanted, but did find some things I didn't realise I wanted. I got a bag of sherbet lemons, some mint humbugs and some chocolate limes from Poundland for my sweetie buffet. I got a roll of brown paper and some string, for making packages for the outdoors display.

And I also got..... three big black sheets of card. Two are going to become Hogwarts banners - I've seen fabric versions online but doing it this way is going to cost me ooh, about £2, as opposed to £7 before post and packing. And the third one will be the scoreboard. I'm going to print off the house crests to stick onto each quarter, and then print categories to stick onto the board, and I've bought a gold pen that I will use on the night to write the points down with!

I can just about see it in my head, but it's going to be interesting to try and put it onto paper, especially since like I mentioned, I'm not the sort of naturally talented woman who can throw some glitter and glue at a scrapbook and have it come out looking like a professional job.

Updates and pictures possibly tonight or tomorrow! In other news, I went to T K Maxx and now have a visceral need for a glittery silver owl.

Of Course! Brainwave!

I'm an idiot!

For the last month I've been wondering how I'm going to manage a fake forest in the bedroom - you have to walk through the bedroom to get to the bathroom, which is going to be Aragog's Lair - and thinking about cutting up big bits of cardboard to make them.

Which completely overlooks the obvious. So bloody obvious!

Artificial christmas trees.

Now I feel so genius, it's ridiculous.

I Love Charity Shops

We did one of my favourite things ever yesterday.

We went to Age UK.

I love charity shops, but none more than the Age UK furniture store in Kiln Farm, mainly because it's a whole warehouse full of second hand goods instead of just a small shop on a high street. I went for one specific thing, which I didn't get (a portable CD player) but I came away with some great other things I hadn't expected!

1. Two huge suitcases. As I mentioned before, outside I want a little display of luggage trolley with cases and an owl perched on top. They had two lovely brown suitcases, exactly what I wanted - only £4 each. I nearly died.

2. A ton of potions flasks. I gave up on having test tubes as bit fiddly and decided to go for potions bottles with shot glasses. We got some great ones, a lovely glass decanter, four small tulip-shaped ones and a couple of long tall ones. They look amazing, and were all £1 or £2 each.

3. A brass chalice. I want to do a display of horcruxes and this'll do for Helga Hufflepuff's cup, though it doesn't have handles.

4. And finally, a long rope of fabric leaves - a glittery gold. They're more Christmassy than anything I guess! But they were just so beautiful, I had to get them. They were only a £1.

So I'm pretty happy. I got far more than I thought I would, and to top things off in the post my flickering LED candles arrived, so we also bought some batteries and fishing wire. Once I have a trial run of what they're going to look like, I'll post a pic. I'm expecting it to be one of the more awesome parts of the whole thing.

Now I need to focus on getting a forbidden forest for upstairs!

Cloaks & Outdoor Fun

Our cloaks turned up!

Well. To be truthful, mine is a cloak and Tel's are more like robes, since his has giant bat-like sleeves (very snape-ish) and mine is just a black column that ties at the neck. But they both look amazing, really cool. I haven't got pictures yet because.... I want to wait till we're properly decked out to put them up, but it was worth getting them!

Bit of a costume breakdown:

Hermione (me) - Cloak £9, Socks £3, Pinafore £3, Tie £4.
Plus I already had a wand from years back! So total - £19

Snape (Tel) - Robes £20.
We're going to dye his hair black, which'll be about a fiver, he's wearing his own black clothes under the robes and I'm bidding on a wand on ebay so I don't know how much that'll be yet. If it goes too high though, I might see if I can just make one for him. There are a metric ton of guides on how to do so online after all.


On to the outdoors segment of this post. I finally worked out what I want to have outside in the front garden - I was originally thinking Quidditch posts but it's not like they'll get used, and I'd like to have something more in tune with the 'platform 9 3/4' look I'm aiming for. So I'm going up in the loft soon to dig out Tel's luggage trolley from his old van driving job, and then I'm going charity-shop hunting for some battered suitcases and an owl cage!

I'm also looking for ways to get some music playing at the start of the path to the house. It's not a long walk but I think it'd be very atmospheric to have Hedwig's Theme playing on a loop so when people get near the house, they can hear it before they actually get inside.

Not sure where to start on that though - I need something that can survive being without mains power and isn't going to be a big loss if it gets nicked.

Homemade Signage

It's been a bit quiet on the Halloween front, not that I haven't been actively scouring eBay for bargains. I'm just in that part of the month that equals stretching the pennies, so I can't be buying much right now.

Instead, I'm seeing what I can make!

For the outside of the house, I want to have a Platform 9 3/4 sign on the bushes at the front of the path leading to the house, with train tracks drawn in chalk up to the door. Originally I was planning to buy a canvas and paint a sign, in the style I've seen people using on sites like Etsy and which look awesome. But then I thought - people are going to spend about two seconds looking at this, that money could be better spent elsewhere.

So yesterday, using Paint of all things, I did this:

I'm ridiculously proud of it, even if the bottom bar is slightly bigger than the rest. The plan is to print it out and fix it a stiff piece of cardboard. Then I can hang it outside!

My only worry is that if it rains, it might run. It's only printer ink so I'm not sure how it'll hold up against the elements. On the other hand, since it's costing pretty much nothing to make, I might print off a spare and put it up beforehand to see how it does.

Honeydukes Prep

We went to Ikea yesterday. I love Ikea, and could happily spend a day there eating hotdogs and meatballs and filling a trolley with fluffy rugs and cute side tables.

However, this time we had a purpose! I'd been searching the internet for sweet shop jars and not come across anything that suited my purposes as well as being affordable. Having a candy buffet is very 'in' right now, mainly for weddings but also for parties, so prices aren't as reasonable as they could be. Luckily, I have a marvelous boyfriend who knows things I don't, like: Ikea stock glass jars a lot like what I was looking for.

So we went, and now I have 3 large and 3 medium glass jars, with sealing lids!

I also received two more packages in the post, one of which is completely perfect considering that I'd just been and bought the other half of it. Sugar tongs!

And last but not least, my Harry Potter badges. I posted the eBay listing picture of them originally but here they are!

I was also surprised to find they'd included a fifth badge - maybe my purchase of 20 Harry Potter pins gave them an idea about where my interests lie....

Little Books!

This isn't going to be a long post, but I got a little package in the post and I had to show it off...

I present: shrunken hardbacks!

The photo is rubbish because it was just me holding the packet in front of my webcam but it gives a good idea of the scale. Those of you attending the party, take note! These are what you need to keep your eyes peeled for, haha.

Games Galore!

One of the hardest,most worrying parts of throwing a party:

Is anyone going to enjoy themselves?

For my first proper party last year, I had Tempt Your Fate available for people to play. The object was mainly to induce drinking. Vast amounts of drinking. And it worked! So I'm trying to put together some games for this year on the basis that they get people talking, moving about, and hopefully cheerfully bungalowed.

So what have I got up my (non-wizarding) sleeve?


1. Shrunken Hardback Hunt

Neville was practicing his charms in the library when he accidentally shrunk the full set of Harry Potter books! Now the books are loose within Hogwarts - if you find one, return it to Hermione to win house points.


2. Snape's Potion Challenge

Professor Snape is very angry! Some thieving first years have been in his potions cupboard and torn of all the labels off his vials. Each student must work with their housemates to guess what substance each vial holds, and there's only one way to find out - by drinking them!


3. Hermione's Tricky Trivia

Think you know Harry Potter? Find Hermione and challenge her to pose you a question from her Cauldron Of Questions - get it right and you could win points for your house.


These games fit all my criteria - fairly cheap to set up, something people can do with others but also individually, and don't involve trying to get everyone together in one room at the same time! That's the part I dread when people suggest things to do - it'd be like herding cats. In a cheese and mice factory.

And all I need now is to buy the test tubes and shrunken books (I'm not actually going to try and shrink some real books. That'd be ridiculous).

First Harry Potter Purchase

The excitement begins! My theme this year for Halloween is 'A Hogwarts Halloween' and I'm already watching a LOT of items on ebay. My first purchase though, is these fantastic badges:

I absolutely love them. They're exactly what I was picturing in my head, which isn't normally easy to match up to. The purpose of these badges is pretty simple - everyone who walks through the front door, including Tel but minus myself, will be sorted into a house (probably by taking a badge from a sorting hat). The best part is, once they're sorted they can wear the badge and identify other housemates!

This will be useful because there are going to be house points awarded for various activities around the house - some being very basic, like taking a shot to win ten points, others being harder - and if people know who their housemates are, they can easily group together. Why bother, you ask? I'll tell you why - the house with the most points at the end of the night will be awarded prizes!

This is the first purchase, but there's going to be more as the weeks go by - I need to get a Hermione costume sorted for one thing, and some Snape-related items for Tel.

The Long Awaited Update!

I know, I know. I did an update about some aspects of the 2010 party, and then vanished into thin air. I didn't intend to, but once Halloween is over I tend to lose interest briefly, because Christmas is then only 2 months away and dammit, I always decorate on the 1st of December.

I have some really awesome, amazing plans for this year's Halloween. I'm starting a lot earlier, because I therefore have far more time to save, spend and squirrel away bits and pieces. To give you a clue as to my plans, this year will be called 'A Hogwarts Halloween'.

But before I get into that, I'm going to make this post an update on last year! Reading the posts I actually did last year reminded me how helpful it is to see what you should have done differently - I'd forgotten that two bags of leaves wasn't enough, for example. So documenting what I can remember will hopefully bring back some memories and make planning this year easier.

I'm lying, of course. Planning this year is already taking over my life.

Tempt Your Fate - A Review

This game went down a storm. I was worried no one would play, but everyone had a go, and the only problem was that I'd made far too many fates and no one got one of the treats, so we had to do a random draw for them at the end of the night!

First up is Jenny selecting a Fate!

This is a slightly blurry shot of the Fate she selected. In case you can't read it, it says:

"You've really pissed off the Fates! Redeem yourself! Do a shot from your choice of the Spooky Spirits!"

And she selected the green Spirits! There was also a choice of a red Spirit but green was more popular overall. Among the other Fates, there were instructions telling you to eat a Beastly Body Part (a gummy body part covered in syrup, that is) or to do a shot of Awful Antidote (dark rum - it was bloody awful, I can attest to that!) and there were a couple of Fates that told people to hug a stranger, or kiss one, etc etc.

I definitely think this game helped encourage people to both loosen up and drink throughout the night. I'm not doing it again this year but I've got other plans for drinking games to help keeps things ticking along.

Other Details

As I mentioned in a previous post, I seriously underestimated how much time it would take to set everything up, which meant when people started arriving I hadn't had time to take pictures of the little details. The best pictures are already in the post before this one.

Overall, the entire thing went really well! Everyone really enjoyed themselves, and as a result I'm really looking forward to this year's party. Hopefully some of the last year's guests might even be reading this and in case they are: here are some random photos from throughout the night. There's none of me because these are all from my camera!