Harry Potter Party (Part Three)

Quidditch

Making the Quidditch game probably required the most time and effort, but it was so fun! I was on a mad search for hula hoops, and of course could not find any at the dollar store at that time. I searched multiple stores and finally found them at K-Mart.

My husband made one snip so that we could place them in a T joint PVC pipe. And then taped them with some heavy duty tape.

The hoops were not wide enough to fit exactly, so somehow we decided to try pipe foaming, probably because we had some laying around. I'm not sure if this was the best choice. It worked okay, but did take a few attempts on some hoops, and on the second attempt the foam can's applicator straw thing was all clogged up (multiple times) so we had to keep finding new tiny sturdy straws to fit in the nozzle.

(here you can kind of see the gap left after an application of spray foam. The gap allowed the hoops too much movement, so they would fall down instead of standing up)

I was trying to have them look pretty, but in the end just globbed a bunch of foam in there, and painted it, and you know, none of the kids noticed that the Quidditch hoops were less than perfect!

Then we stuck the T into another PVC pipe, we picked two different heights.

(this was pre hula hoops, and obviously just one height!)

Then we spray painted them gold. Let dry, flipped and did other side. 

We were not sure how we were going to get them to stay in the ground, but ultimately just hammered the PVC pipe in the grass. As I painted the Quidditch rings I also spray painted a small bouncy ball for the Golden Snitch.

Chocolate Frogs

Of course we needed chocolate frogs for our party! I bought a frog mold of amazon (there were a few to pick from) and we set to work using candy melts and chocolate chips. But beware, chocolate chips are much meltier when you start eating the frogs!

Finding boxes for our frogs proved trickier than I expected. I looked in many places. Ultimately I found these boxes at a party store (I had almost given up after exhausting the store). They had many cute wedding boxes and such, but they were entirely too pricey (we had enough chocolate frogs for each guest at the family and friend party to take one home). These were not perfect, but worked and the price fit!

Wands!

We made the wands using dowels of varying sizes. Miss B. really really wanted boxes for her wands. Searching for boxes was rough for this party. I tried all kind of places and was able to find nothing! I did finally find these at Hobby Lobby, in the jewelry section. They were about $1 a box, which is more than I wanted to spend, but they did look fabulous!

We made the wands from dowels of various sizes. My husband cut them down to the box length (which was shorter than we would have liked, but it worked, no one complained about the size), and we sanded the rough ends.

I made the designs with my hot glue gun. Each wand was different. Then the kids and I painted them. My daughter was not to sure before they were painted, but she LOVED them after. 

And all the kids LOVED them too. My kids are still playing with them (7 months later) and have brought the extras to school for their friends.

Be sure to check out our other Harry Potter Party ideas!