Hogwarts Owlery is OPEN

Well, we finally did it, we sent out all the invites, and WOW what a response. From emails saying "you're totally nuts (in a good way)" to parents begging to get involved, its been AWESOME.

This has definitly rekindled my motivation to keep going, and being the Easter weekend I'm hoping to get the bulk of the cloaks done.

Anyway, here is a look at how the invites went out this week - how gorgeous are those owls?!

I can draw them in my sleep now, which I suppose is a good thing since I'll be doing another one for each child to receive their Hogwarts certificate on the day of the party.

Hogwarts Letters

Printed on my home laser printer directly onto parchment paper.  Then sealed with red was and a "H" wax seal.

"Felix Felicis" - Liquid Luck

One of the Potions classes we're going to get the kids to mix up a small potion bottle of "Felix Felicis" or "Liquid Luck". 

I purchased these gorgeous little glass potion bottles with cork stoppers off ebay.  
I'm going to buy edible gold glitter flakes and let them add a little to some liquid sugar syrup in these little bottles.  I'll print out little labels with the words "Felix Felicis" printed on to stick onto each potion bottle.

I'm still tossing up with the idea of perhaps making a landyard type necklace with a little velour pouch to put the bottle in, that they can hang around their neck for safe keeping.

Hogwarts House Banners

Lincraft have a 50% off material sale on at the moment... can you say SCORE!!!

I went there on Saturday and emerged 2 hours later and several $$ poorer (again, don't tell Hubby LOL)

I picked up felt cloth for the house banner I want to make for hanging from the ceiling in the Great Hall.
I managed to get 3 done this weekend before my stupid eyes / body protested and I got the worst migraine ever.

I'll attempt to finish off the 4th during the course of the week as this weekend I want to focus on the painted brick wall cloth for the entrance doorway of the scout hall.

Hufflepuff

Ravenclaw

Slytherin

New signature

I did a shout out for help for a new signature on EB and the lovely <3 Lisa <3 (aka TheOtherLisa) kindly offered to put her talents to work and these are the results - I'm super stoked, as is Luke of course.

The Hogwarts Express Ticket

THIS part of all things being created for this awesome party, is the one thing that has been giving me sleepless nights - mostly due to the fact that I didn't get off my backside and learn how to use Photoshop so many, many years ago.

Anyhow... a shout-out to all the fantastically creative ladies on http://www.essentialbaby.com.au/ and the gorgeous <3 Jodi <3 put her hand up to have a go for me.

To say I was so excited I did a happy dance and crazy run through the house, is in fact the truth LOL.

I bought some gold and cream shimmery paper from http://www.eckersleys.com.au/ and printed off Jodi's creation and I'm so happy I could .... well lets not go there LOL.

We have since changed the font of the party details to a regular type font that is more easily legible especially for blind bats like myself.

Party details such as Date, Time, Venue and RSVP details @ the bottom

Trying to show the 'shimmer' of the paper I printed the tickets on

SYDNEY to Hogwarts



The Sorting Hat

It FINALLY arrived - our sorting hat has arrived, and its GORGEOUS!
The boys have been sorting everyone they can all weekend. Thank you EBay!!

Another potions class

Now I'll add photos of the same experiment done in a test tube.



Potions class - snow experiment

I managed to get hold of some insta-snow off www.stevespanglerscience.com though no thanks to the actual website ($80 order and they quoted me $5300 to ship it to Australia) THANK-YOU http://shop.australiangeographic.com.au/ for bringing the stuff in AND having it on sale.

So, step 1, place 1 scoop in your palms

Step 2, add water

Step 3, watch the snow form

Step 4, it increases by 100 x, so a small scoop (1/2 scoop in this instance) will fill a 10 year olds hands.  We still have some snow we made about a week ago in a ziplock baggie and its still snow - apparently if you let it dry out, it returns to its powder state and you can re-add water to make it snow again.

Golden snitch

I found large gold Christmas baubles in Spotlight for about $2 each and in the hat-making section I found these netting bows which I then sprayed with gold spray paint and used a glue gun to attach onto the top of the golden snitch.  With some fishing line attached and hanging from the ceiling I think these will make great decorations.

Spooky Spiders

So.......................... I decided to get crafty this weekend, no not wicked crafty, make something crafty LOL.
I can't remember where I got the idea for the egg carton spiders.

You will need:

• empty egg cartons
• petite single hole punch
• black spray paint
• black pipe cleaners
• googly/wiggly eyes
• glue gun

First I cut the egg carton up (in fact, I cut up 3) and punched 4 small hols on 2 opposite sides of each one.

Then I took them outside and sprayed each one black (remember to do inside as well - they'll lose their scary factor if you get to see the grey egg carton colour.

Then I cut 2 pipe cleaners for each spider, in half and diagonally inserted them from one side to the other.



 Next I got out the hot glue gun and stuck on 2 googly/wiggly eyes for each spider.

I am so stoked with the end result.  I'll use fishing line to tie them hanging upside down from the ceiling in the "great hall".



"Holy hell batman!"

I've not had a lot of time for sewing the last few days.  Between working full time and trips to optometrists for Luke for glasses and then James fracturing both forearm bones and trips to doctors and physio and cast put on, I'm SHATTERED!

THANKFULLY Luke and his dad are going camping for scouts this weekend and best of all they leave tomorrow morning (Thursday) and won't be back till Sunday night.  Now with James' arm in a cast, he doesn't really want to do anything so I've declared this my BIG SEWING WEEKEND..... I'm super excited.

Stay tuned for many more posts and uploads this weekend, I intend on making a BIG dent in my prep for the party.

Cake ideas

Luke and I had a discussion about the cake yesterday.  Since one of the highlights on the day is going to be Florean Fortescue's Ice-cream Parlour after lunch, we don't think we're going to need a very big cake.  Every year I do a massive cake for the boys' birthdays and we end up giving so much cake away to go home AND eating cake for the next 3 days ourselves and STILL throwing out a decent % of the cake - so this year I'm going small, even though we're looking at 30 - 40 kids.

We decided we wanted to keep the cake simple and true to the first movie (even though Luke and I both REALLY want a Monster Book of Monsters cake) we've decided to go with a simple spell book with a wand, scarf and snitch on top.

10 minutes of drawing and colouring and we had a sample of the cake we wanted to take with us when we went cake ordering.  If you're reading this and live in Sydney and you make cakes, please contact me, we'd love to hear from you colkeevy@gmail.com I now have quotes of between $200 and $300 by about 5 different people (an entire day of driving around yesterday from cake store to cake store proved successful).

Honeydukes Sign

Exactly the same concept, design and construction as the Hogwarts express sign.  The mathematical ability required for this sign however nearly drove me to drink LOL.

Hogwarts Express Sign

I bought some ply wood from Bunnings, measured out a border, drew on the 9 3/4 sign and the letters for "Hogwarts Express" and got to work painting - All up it took me about 8 hours to get this sign finished.  Ideally I would have liked to use a proper font, but in the end I figured it didn't have to be perfect, it just had to look similar to the sign in the movies. I got hunny to drill a hole on either end, used a small nut/bolt/washer and some lightweight chain in order to hang the sign.

The boys are so excited and can't
wait to get onboard!