Wands - the making of

It's fairly cheap to make cool looking wands.  Walmart has round wooden dowels in assorted sizes for $1 per pack.  Other people have used chop sticks.  We used hot glue guns, black acrylic paint (we tried other colors but liked the black the best), and glossy acrylic spray sealer. 

The kids love to use the glue gun and shape the glue (once cool enough, wait until it's slightly cloudy). Painting the wands was more time consuming and tedious -- too many nooks and crannies.  Maybe spray painting would have been better?  Regardless, you can make these in one day.

Dowels with the glue designs added

Painted with black acrylic

And, finished with spray acrylic sealer.  Can you spot the Elder Wand?

Decor

After entering the house via Platform 9 3/4, we kept it fairly simple.  Every Halloween we decorate the ceiling with bats and a spider web anyway, so we did that a little early for the party.  We made a simple Hogwarts interior with stone backdrop and floating candles above the cake table.

Black crepe paper, construction paper, tape, and fishing line

We fortunately had a dining room light that looked a bit Hogwarts-ish.  I added a 99 cent brick backdrop and hung candles from the light, also from the 99 cent store.

Platform 9 3/4

The crest and platform number were printed on photo paper and affixed with glue.  Scrap wood and gold paint used for frame.

Platform 9 3/4 makes a great entrance.  There are several ways to do accomplish this.  An easy way to do this is to wrap your door or hang this plastic brick backdrop from your door frame. If you slit the plastic so people can run through the wall per Mrs. Weasley's instructions, "Do it at a bit of a run if you're nervous," tape the top of the slit so it doesn't rip. 

My husband decided to go bigger.  Disclaimer -- he actually does have a background in set design, so this was his contribution to the party.  He built a wood frame that would fit between our front pillars and wrapped it with muslin.  You could also get an old white or tan curtain panel and use a tension rod to hang it in the front door frame -- to avoid building the wooden frame.

After priming, he used flat red primer for the brick color using a template that he made from Trader Joe's bags.

Flat red primer

Muslin wrapped frame, primed and showing brick template

Stencils from Walmart were nearly perfect for the font. He used a piece of scrap metal for the sign itself, and spray painted it dark red with letters in gold.

Spell Book party favor

The cover, with Deathly Hallows symbol

Our birthday girl wanted to give a book of "Charms, Spells, and Curses from the Magical World" as the party favor.  We used the leftover parchment paper from the invitations and found this super helpful download for the spell pages.

If you have trouble figuring out how the pages go together (like I did for about half an hour!), here's how it goes...

After you download and save the spell pages from the link above, print them like this:

1. Print page 1, then flip the paper over and print page 6 on the back of it
2. Print page 2, flip, print page 3 on back
3. Print page 4, flip, print page 5 on back
4. Put the pages together so they make sense in alpha order by spell
5. Staple the spine a couple of times (you might have to fold the paper a little to get the staple to the middle)

To change the cover, I converted the PDF to MSWord and added the new cover title and image. We simplified and didn't do a separate hardcover or bookmark.  We used this Harry Potter font generator, too.