Harry Potter Party - the wash up

Today we had a Harry Potter party for Oliver and 9 of his friends.  I've mentioned before the many amazing Harry Potter parties on the intranet.  This probably wasn't one of them, but here are a few good parts of the party.  By the time the party happened at 4pm storms had surrounded Canberra and the rain came and went, came and went. We did potions inside but luckily were able to go outside to play quidditch.
I did a lot of research on how on earth we were going to play muggle quidditch, without broomsticks and flying.  In the end I used ideas from all over the place to come up with what I think are very cool rules... though perhaps not that Harry Potter-ish.

We had 2 goals rather than 6

The main difference between my quidditch and the real quidditch is that the golden snitch is a person.  In order to determine who would be the golden snitch I hid (ferrero rocher) golden snitches in the garden with one that had 'S' all over it.  The person who found that one became the golden snitch and got to wear this fantastic gold bowler hat.  Their job was to avoid being caught and there were 'safe' areas they could run to.  I had a few other rules that I might post another time in more detail but the main thing was that there was also a person from each side who could throw water balloons at the opponents.  But only their legs, if they hit any other part of the body they were out for one minute.  It was 36 degrees so no one really complained about the water balloons!

I was going to make robes for everyone, but I didn't.  Instead everyone got to wear a house badge to identify what team they were on.  We changed positions regularly.  To be honest everyone just ran around and focussed too much on the water balloons, so that didn't really work so well.. but I still think it was a good set of rules.

After Quidditch we were going to do the pinata.  I had great plans for this dementor pinata.  The boys were going to have to do the patronus charm and shout 'Expecto Patronum' while they whacked the dementor.  I had made this pretty sturdy and was looking forward to 15 minutes of dementor whacking. Unfortunately the rain had weakened the pinata and by the time I returned with said 'whacking stick' one of the boys had already pulled the dementor down and the boys were like vultures scraping out it's insides for loot.  For a short moment, my happiness had been sucked from me, just like a real dementor!

All wasn't lost.. there was cake!  Originally I was going to do a golden snitch cake, but instead on walking into the cake shop to get the ball mould, Oliver saw a skull cake tin and declared that he wanted a 'dark mark' cake.  A glittering green skull with a snake protuding from it's mouth. I put a picture next to it for this photo just so I'd remember what I was trying to create. It's wrong isn't it! I suppose I'll be able to reuse this when he Oliver goes into his heavy metal phase!!!  Yep, it's pretty dodgy, but the boys liked it.  Gross!

 

And here are the contents of the party bag: A Honeydukes sampler.  Yep, sugar overload! The Standard Book of Spells I got from etsy.