Preparing for a Potter Party

My second girl will turn 10 soon, and for her party this year, she's asked for a Harry Potter theme. As is often the wont with our kid parties, the scale of this is rapidly galloping away from me, but it's all fun at the same time :-) We've hired the church hall, cos she is having quite a few kids, so space isn't an issue, mercifully.

I am going to do a few posts on different aspects of our Potter adventure, with how-tos if we manage to pull off anything great. Our rough conception so far includes:

Games
- Potions Class - a do-it-yourself experiment station with all the fizzy bicarb experiments there are
- Pin the Beak on the Hippogriff - with special Hippogriff painted by my artist Dad
- Musical Statues, which we are giving some kind of Potterific name we haven't thought of yet
- Pass the Parcel, with magical prizes
- Some form of Quidditch...

Food
- A Golden Snitch birthday cake
- Potter cookies, Deathly Hallows cookies, and (if I get time) wizard-hat cupcakes
- Cauldron Cakes (basically, big fluffy pancakes)
- Pumpkin Pasties(OK, gonna cheat - just buying sausage rolls and CALLING them Pumpkin Pasties)
- Little sausages (frankfurts)
- Train Pies (Party pies)
- Fruit skewers just because we always have them at parties :-)
- Potterific drinks - ButterBeer (Cream Soda), Fire Whiskey (Raspberry lemonade), Pumpkin Juice (Fanta) and Elf Made Wine (Coke). Printable labels are your friends...

Party Favours
- A lolly buffet with a twist - we're going to set up a Honeydukes Sweets Shop, using these labels I found online, and let guests fill their own party bags!

Decorations
- House banners, which I have luckily found printables for online
- Owl balloons
- We're going to try to do up a Mirror of Erised too, but let's not make any promises at this stage
- Potter music and possibly low-impact movie clips

Harry Potter gear is heinously expensive, but I've been very fortunate to get the loan of two full Gryffindor costumes for my two older kids (younger one has a generic witchy costume she can wear). The magic of Internet tutorials and printables is also a beautiful thing in this space.

The party is Saturday week, and so far, I've printed all the labels / banners / decorations, secured the costumes, and baked the two halves of the round cake for the Snitch. Tomorrow, in between a parade of tradespeople coming to do various things to my house, is dedicated to lolly-jar and lolly / drink shopping, making the dough for cookies (I'll freeze it to bake next Thursday), and getting all the Pass the Parcel objects and wrapping it. My Dad has already painted the Hippogriff, and on Saturday my friend the cake decorator extraordinaire is coming to help construct the Snitch.

It does leave a few things to do late next week, but very fortunately, I have both Thursday and Friday off next week thanks to some overtime I have worked over the past fortnight. I think there's no doubt I'll be shattered by the time this is done, but it's a good kind of shattered, and seeing Miss 10's excitement makes it all worthwhile.