Charlie’s Harry Potter Birthday party was divided into three main parts. I’m going to deal with the first part today: Diagon Alley.
I wish I had some better pictures, but you know how parties go: I was lucky to get what I got! After this picture was taken, we stuck the wands upright in a cauldron, which looked better, but we didn’t get a picture of that.
For the party, I boiled Diagon Alley down to three main points: you get a wand, you get a pet, and you get a spellbook. I’ve already posted how I made the owl puppets:
I also made some wands.
I used the popular hot glue on a dowel rod method. (Another version here.) Well, a lot of other people use chopsticks, which I was not able to find. I did find packs of long, thin dowels at the store which worked well, and I used a pencil sharpener to point the tips of the thinner ones and am exacto blade to point the tips of the thicker ones.
Let me tell you. While you are making them, these look so dumb. They look exactly as though you have smeared quite a bit of glue onto a stick. You may be worried. Once you paint them, however:
Wands. It’s magic, I tell you. The dowels came in a pack of about 8/$1, I believe, which means that including paint and glue these probably cost less than a quarter apiece. Score!
Finally, we printed and stapled spell books for each child.
Here’s where we printed them off from…theirs are much fancier. The kids all liked ours just fine, though!
We taped a black tablecloth to a table, printed off a sign that said ‘Diagon Alley’ (free font here) and taped it to the front, and set up our wares.
We had our party at a park, so we let the kids run and play until most of the guests had arrived. Then we set them loose on Diagon Alley and let them select their supplies. Once everyone was ready, we all lined up in a ‘train’ and pretended to be the Hogwarts Express, making train noises all the way over to where Hogwarts was set up.
Next stop Hogwarts!
(Looking for more? Check out these links!)
Harry Potter Party Invitations
Easy Owl Hand Puppets
Harry Potter Party – Hogwarts
Harry Potter Party – Honeydukes
