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?

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.