Harry Potter Baby Shower

One thing I love doing is throwing my friends baby showers. It's such a great celebration of life and love, and is full of friends and family having great fun!

Earlier this year, I helped plan a Harry Potter baby shower for one of my dear friends, and I had a blast putting everything together. Hopefully I can help inspire anyone else looking to plan one too!

Most of my ideas and inspiration came from my Pinterest board here, so be sure to take a look!

Displaying jars of candy in Hogwarts house colors is a fun and tasty way to greet your guests!

A cute Hedwig adds ambiance, and works as favors for the little ones! (Owl sold here for $11)

I wanted to make some colorful potions for decorations, but didn't want to spend a ton of money. My solution was to look at my local thrift store for some unique looking jars, and then to fill them with dishsoap samples from the dollar store!

If you want to make them extra magical, add some glitter! I used some of the edible pearl dust that we also put in our pensieve punch in the blue soap, since it was more translucent than the purple or pink

I found some fabulous potion labels from Saving with Sarah, and aged them with tea. It's a super easy and useful trick that I used for the labels, and for the Hogwarts acceptance letters I made. 

Aging Paper Instructions:

Make some black tea or coffee, then line a cookie sheet with foil. 

Print out paper to be aged, place on cookie sheet, then pour tea/coffee over it. 

Soak for about 5 minutes (the longer they soak, the darker they'll be). 

Drain off the liquid. 

Place the paper in the oven at 200 degrees for about 7 minutes, or until the edges start to curl. 

Boom! Amazing aged paper!

I wrote custom Hogwarts acceptance letters for both the mom and dad to-be, and for the baby to come! I created my own letters using the free font Magik, the Hogwarts crest from the Harry Potter Wiki, as well as their image of Albus Dumbledore's signature. 

One craft I had always wanted to do was to recreate the winged keys from the first book. I already had a collection of skeleton keys, but you can find a variety of options online (Amazon sells a batch of 30 for only $8 here).

 I cut out rectangles of about 1" by 3" of cream colored tulle, then simply tied them in a knot around the key. I then used clear thread (you can also use fishing line) to hang them at different heights from an embroidery hoop (also found at my thrift store). 

We also sorted guests into houses as they came in by shouting the house name really loudly (RAVENCLAW!!), a la the Sorting Hat, and then bestowing small felt ties that I made from the tutorial over at One Sweet Appetite. 

They each have tiny hair clips on the back to attach to shirts without creating holes!

Some of our friends made bunting that spelled out "Welcome Little Muggle", which I thought was adorable.

A great interactive gift idea I came up with was a personalized ABC book! I designed and cut out 26 pages with letters on them (A is for...) and let the guests draw and color in their ideas!

You're more than welcome to use my documents for the ABC book itself here, and for the geeky suggestions sheet (since I know that all knowledge of the anything immediately disappears when someone asks).

After the shower, I took the pages home and laminated them. After binding them, I created a custom cover and presented it to the parents!

And what would a party post be without mentioning the food!

Butterbeer! (AKA Iced tea or any of the million recipes online) 

Plus some Quidditch googles (borrowed from my steampunk Tinkerbell)!

House cookies!

Professor Sprout's veggies, Polyjuice potion (made from green ice cream, 7Up, and some edible pearl dust), Bertie Bott's Every Flavor Beans, and Ollivander's Pretzel wands.

There was also a rousing game of Quidditch pong!

Slytherin won, but only through some questionable strategies (true to house form).

Some Harry Potter themed gifts complete the party perfectly!

 

I hope that helped inspire you to create your very own magical Harry Potter party! Please let me know if you have any questions or comments. Thanks for reading!