Harry Potter Birthday Party - Part One - The Planning, Preparation, and Decorations

This past Saturday, we celebrated Cooper's 9th Birthday with a Harry Potter inspired party. I had a great time planning and preparing for the party since I love all Harry Potter books so much and there were hundreds of pinterest and blog ideas to inspire ideas.

It all started with a homemade invitation. I forgot to take pictures of the invitation, but we made it into an acceptance letter to Hogwarts school of Witchcraft and Wizardry with a train ticket for Hogwarts Express included and stained the invitations with tea bags for an authentic look. We even dripped red candle wax to seal the envelopes and stamped them with an H stamp I had on hand. I'll have to see if my husband captured a photo. I simply drafted the letters up in Microsoft Word after looking at several ideas on Etsy.

I sewed robes following this simple Tutorial and these scarves from Pieces by Polly as well. The scarves turned out great! So soft and warm. I decided not to make Slytherin robes because Cooper and I both decided that kids would not be very excited about being a Slytherin. Each robe took about 10 minutes once I got the hang of the pattern/cutting and each scarf took about 20 minutes from cutting to finish sewing. Not bad. I ordered a pack of 5 patches from Amazon to sew on to each robe as well to make them look slightly more authentic. This was the most expensive part of the party, fabric is always more expensive than I think it will be! I got the fleece and Oly Fun and plan polyester black fabric from Hobby Lobby using a 40% off coupon.

I also created all the wands by following a tutorial I saw on pinterest using chopsticks/dowels and hot glue! It was really easy to do! We just let glue cover the wands in different patters, then painted using brown, black, gold, and silver paint, and then when dry, painted all of them with Modge Podge to seal in the paint. Cooper helped with the whole process.

Decorating

In order to decorate for the Party, I printed off a lot of printables from etsy. I ordered this package, on etsy which turned out great! I ordered plates and the banner you see in the background above from Amazon. 

And using this etsy package of printables for the Honeydukes sweets/party favors! Amazingly enough, most of the printables are free on instructables . I couldn't believe how many amazing free things you could download! 

 I made these banners by printing off free house emblems I found and cutting out black felt into banner shapes.  I hot glued the paper emblems onto the felt and we used yarn and tape to tape them on my wall. 

The treat table was so fun to come up with. I did rock candy swizzle sticks for "Acid Pops" and made the chocolate frogs from a cheap mold I bought on amazon.  It worked perfectly! The boxes I made from a free printable I found on Instructables. They even include Trading Cards you can print! Couldn't believe how well they turned out. I didn't have card stock and just used simple normal white printing paper for everything. I bought Bettie botts every flavored jelly beans on Amazon in packages that came with 8 boxes, sour gummy worms, and fake sticky slugs as well to add to the favor bags. The favor bags are from Michaels Arts and Crafts Store. 

Oh, and of course we had to decorate the front of the house to look like Platform 9 and 3/4! So, I ordered this brick wall plastic table cover and cut it and hung across the front door so that kids could run through it to enter the house. 

And I added a few more signs into the bathroom and to every room just about on the first floor of our house. 

Plus, threw in suitcases, brooms, and any knights/owls/books I could find into the party rooms to make my house seem more like Hogwarts. For the Great Hall, I made floating candles using toilet paper rolls that I spray painted white (following ideas I saw all over pinterest). 

Oh yes! The cake! I made a Monster Book of Monsters Cake for Cooper using this tutorial. For the cake part, I made 2 chocolate cakes from scratch, made homemade chocolate buttercream icing for the brown hair, and white marshmallow fondant for the pages, teeth, mouth, tongue and nose/face. It turned out better than I expected and Cooper loved it. We made snitches from Ferrero Rocher chocolates and cutting out white paper to look like wings that we then hot glued on to the sides of the chocolates. 

Check out Part II for the games/activities we did at the Harry Potter Birthday Party.