Hermione, Can I Borrow Your Time-Turner, Please?

Holy Hedwig! I apologize, Blogosphere. I've been so busy eating, sleeping, shopping and planning Harry Potter shit I haven't had time to do much else. My house is furry around the edges (where's my Vacuum Bitch, aka MR?) and the laundry is piling up. If Zombiegirl hadn't given up fast food for Lent (my good little Lutheran…) we'd be eating out every day this past week. I'm starting to cast spells on the people around me, and alas, they're not working.
So to take you all down the road to the Harry Potter hell I've been in, let me tell you what I've been doing.

Zombiegirl's birthday is coming up. She's going to be 11. And I've told her this is the last big party I'm throwing her. From here on in, we'll do the movie thing with a couple of friends, or a light sleepover, or a trip to the city with a BFF or two. Middle school is going to be hard enough with all the cattiness and the backstabbing. I'm not going to add to that mess with "who-invites-who-to-whose-birthday-party" crap. From here on in, birthday's are on the down-low. We're going to pick and choose whose parties she goes to based on who's throwing it and where they're held. If I deem them a waste of time due to the location or the child, she's not attending. We'll plan something else to do instead. I want her to be friendly with everyone, but some of the parties she's invited to, well, the friendship seems superficial. I want her to have meaningful friendships, not ones based on presents. Or how many kids are invited to the "popular" girl's party.

When I asked Z-girl what kind of party she wanted, she thought for 10 seconds and said "Harry Potter". Yes, she was reading the book at the time.

Now, I thought last year's party was the bomb. I didn't think anything could top that. A photo scavenger hunt in the mall, then cookie decorating and candy selection at Dylan's Candy Bar! That was probably the best party a kid could want. They all had a blast and went home with tons of sweets and a huge sugar high that day. What could I do to top that? If you know me, you know that I'm a crazed party planner. It's what I used to do as a side job. Planning kids parties, then later planning adult parties. I hate going to an actual party- for me, it's all about the details and the planning stage. Ask my older kids about their childhood parties. I threw them craft parties, Pocohantas parties, a Fashion Show, a zoo scavenger hunt, a star-filled Sweet Sixteen and a Disney Graduation Party. Different and unique. Without any help from the Web, either. I planned everything by myself and each and every one of them (except maybe the craft party…only one kid showed up…) was a huge success. I live for a party, at least to plan it. And dammit, I was determined this was going to be a good one.

I started researching Harry Potter parties on the Interwebs. And I was totally surprised at how much info there is out there. And how many geeks love Harry Potter enough to throw huge, intricate parties!

So I agreed (being a Harry Potter geek myself) and started planning.

Zombiegirl has 95% control over this party. Almost every idea has to be run past her first. I'm saving 5% of the control to surprise the kid- I want her to feel the Harry Potter magic as well.

I'm posting each piece of the party as a separate blog post labelled HPP. I'm also going to link my sources of inspiration because I couldn't have even STARTED thinking about this without these talented people's posts and websites.

THE INVITATIONS

Now that all the invites have been delivered, I can post how I created them.

I'm blessed with a person like Rob who can get me any type of paper I need. I'm also blessed with the freedom to do stuff at work without too many prying eyes. I took the parchment that Rob got me and typed up the invite in Word almost verbatim from "The Sorcerer's Stone". Since we're having the party at St. Andrew's, I included directions to the social hall, aka King's Cross Station.

Since I only had 8.5" x 11" parchment to make the envelopes, I had to fold the invites to fit. A little manuevering in Word let me print the addresses before I cut and folded the sheets to fit around the invites.

Since these invites have to been delivered by "owl post" I wanted to put something in the post mark spot besides at stamp. And since I'm trying to make this as low-budget as possible, I didn't want to go out and buy an owl stamp. So I researched rubber owl stamps on the Web and found a suitable picture. I looked around my office for a rubber eraser, which is pretty hard since I don't actually draft plans anymore (I did finally find one in the back of my drafting table) and copied the owl onto the eraser. I spent the next hour cutting the eraser out to make the owl in relief. I rubbed a red sharpie marker over it and stamped the invite. I was so excited about the result I giggled all the way into Soulspeak and Ruddyna's office to show them. They must think I'm a freak...

More carving of the eraser produced a backwards "Owl Post" so I had to redo it and then stamped it under the owl. "Owl Post" indeed!

These invites needed one more touch- the wax seal on the back. Again, I didn't want to spend $8 on wax and an "H" seal at Michael's, so back to Google. I found this very inventive website. Using my hot glue gun, a block of frozen mozzarella cheese, three buttons from Mom's collection and some black spray paint I created the "wax" seal for the back.

We drove Zombiegirl around a few nights to deliver them. She was stealthy and quiet when sneaking up on the houses, dropping the invitations off and running away. She hand delivered them to her whole soccer team. Thirty-four invitations in total.

We are on our way. I need a Butterbear...

1 comments:

tiarx said...

HOLY HARRY POTTER!! THOSE INVITES ARE ... ARE... GENUINE! ABSOLUTELY AWESOME! ...AND I'LL NEVER LOOK AT MOZZARELLA THE SAME WAY AGAIN :)

 

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