Some Stuff I Made

I’ve been obsessed with making plushies lately. I made a Pacman inspired crib mobile last month, and wanted to try my hand at some plush dolls.

I found some templates on Pinterest and modified them a bit to fit the color felt I had. The Joker plush I did not make from a template - it was totally “freestyle”- although I did do the face similar to some Kawaii plushies I’ve seen online. 

I’m not quite sure what to do with them yet, but they’re small enough to make great keychains or tree ornaments. TO THE BATCAVE!!

Baby’s here! And that means it’s time for a DIY Ms. Pacman crib mobile!

I’ve discovered the wonderful world of felt plushies. They’re super easy to put together and you don’t need much except felt, a needle, thread, and maybe a glue gun for tacking things on.

After cutting out the shapes, I pulled apart a few cotton balls to stuff the ghost and pac plushies. I also glued together a few cardboard circles and wrapped them in colorful yarn to have something to hang the ghosts from.

I love how the eyeballs look pixelated! 

Wrapping the circles in yarn took awhile. I made sure to put a dot of glue every so often to prevent an unravelling travesty.

It’s a Super Mario Baby Shower! We’re celebrating the arrival of our little Princess Peach with a Mario themed baby shower. 

What’s a Mario party without the big baddies? Don’t turn your back, or Boo will sneak up on you!

After painting the styrofoam balls, I cut the mouths out and hot glued all of the facial features. Hot gluing tiny teeth is serious business. Helpful tip: Get SMOOTH styrofoam. Makes the painting process a WHOLE lot easier. 

It was Spirit Week at ZJ’s school, and Candy Land was the name of the game. I made a candy inspired headband that was a hit with everyone at school.

The day finally came! Despite being without power for 3 days due to Hurricane Irma, we were still able to pull this party together. It was a success! 

Gryffindor Notice board. Anyone seen Neville’s toad? 

Watch out for that Howler! 

Mind the staircase!

The floating candles turned out ah-mazing!

Don’t wanna be seen in Diagon Alley. People will think you’re up to no good.

Make sure you’re on time for potions!

House badges and glasses.

You’d be crazy to steal from Gringotts!

Honeydukes!

I was so happy with the way everything turned out. The guests enjoyed themselves, even the adults wanted to join in the fun! The months of preparation were well worth their reactions. I got about 90% of my ideas from Pinterest, so if you see some of your artwork on here, thank you and I promise I didn’t make any money off of your work. In fact, I think I lost some! LOL

It’s August! That means there’s only 6 weeks until ZJ’s most fabulous Harry Potter birthday party! I have all kinds of goodies for the kids to take home, but where will they put them all? In these:

In my quest to create the most awesome Harry Potter party ever, I have two words to say: Cake Toppers. In my search for a great looking (and tasting) HP cake, I’ve decided to create some cool cake toppers that would dress up any cake. 

The best part is they’re custom made to look like my 3 favorite September birthday kids, whose birthdays are each about a week apart.  It’s a total surprise that I hope they’ll love, and if I say anymore, you may have to make an unbreakable vow.

I lightly sketched the outline of the faces and clothes with a pencil and painted directly on top. It took a few coats, but the final result was amazing! Now all I want to do is paint tiny little wooden people. 

What’s a Harry Potter Party without your school books? Luckily, I didn’t have to go all the way to Flourish & Blotts to get these. I went to Pinterest.

When I saw these book covers I thought they would make great props to lay around casually. “Oh, this book here? That’s just my History of Magic textbook.” 

The books that I had in my library didn’t really fit the covers, so I had to use some double sided tape around the edges to get the covers to stay put. I thought it would be better to use smaller books that would fit the covers completely instead of larger books.

In my quest for the ultimate Potter Party, I have come across a ton of free printables (see my pinterest link for the sources of many of the printables I used). You can’t have a HP birthday party with Bertie Botts Every Flavor Beans, and you can’t have Every Flavor Beans without the iconic box from the movie (although I have seen people do it, but being such a huge Potterhead I wouldn’t dream of having Every Flavor Beans in a plastic baggie.)

When printing these out onto card stock I reduced the size by 50%. I thought the full page was just too big. You can never have too many jelly beans, but I decided that if I want to keep my sanity during this party, I may want to scale back the amount of jelly beans per box. Plus, there are some other Honey Dukes goodies that will be making a appearance. 

Here is the template I found (with the artist’s info of course). I’ll probably get a box of HP jelly beans to mix in with some “safer” flavors. Is that bean toffee flavored or earwax? Guess you’ll have to taste it and find out.

In my quest for having the best Harry Potter Party Props ever, I had an idea to make a jar of “Dragon’s Blood”. I thought it would be a really cool party prop for my daughter to keep after the party’s over.

My next HP DIY in the quest for birthday party awesomeness is Chocolate Frogs, complete with boxes (because you can’t really have one without the other IMHO.)

There are tons of chocolate frog box templates on Google, but my Pinterest has the ones that I used. There are even templates for the chocolate frog boxes (the best reason to buy a chocolate frog). In order to make sure the cards fit inside the boxes, I had to scale them down to 65%, and like Goldilocks, it only took me three tries to figure this out. (The Godric card is at 65%)

Putting the box together was relatively easy as well. You definitely need a ruler or some kind of scoring tool to get the edges nice and crisp, and yes, it is imperative that you crisp those edges, otherwise it will look like crap. Since I was testing this one out I didn’t bother, but when I print out the other 19 boxes I will be scoring the $hit outta those edges. 

One of the more memorable parts of the HP movies and Books is when Harry encounters the moving staircases. Now, it would be awesome to have moving staircases for this party, but there’s this thing called reality that keeps getting in the way (curse you realiltyyy! *shakes fist*) So, I have (with my Hubby’s help), come up with an alternative - a moving staircase mobile.

Have you ever tried to create a staircase out of cardboard and paper? Well, let’s just say that I really could’ve used a magic wand.

I drew the railings onto white cardboard, then stained the board with tea to make it look aged. I folded up a piece of paper for the stairs, and it was tricky AF. Once I was able to line up the railing and the accordion folded paper, I glued the “steps” into place.

It’s been awhile since I posted any projects, but I am working on some major Birthday DIY. It’s like the Crafting Olympics in my house, and it’s all because Im planning ZJ’s 6th birthday party!! Woot! Woot!