I wish I had a magic spell to extend the holidays — I still have several gifts to make! Luckily, one is for a crafty friend who also was rushing to finish MY gift, so we decided to give each other a few more days! And I know that I will be happy to get a new gift a week after Christmas, so hopefully the other recipients of my late-arriving gifts will feel the same.
Among the gifts I DID finish were some Harry Potter-themed goodies for my son, my nephew and my niece. I gave my niece and nephew the first few books in the series last Christmas and the rest this year. To go along with the books, I made them each a wand and a spell book, along with a Potions Kit so they can mix up their own experiments. The magic black cat is Herbie, he wasn’t part of the gifts, but he’s a good model 🙂
The wands are pretty amazing given that they consist of just one sheet of regular copy paper, some hot glue and some paint! I followed the awesome Instructables tutorial by dadcando.com, and it was so easy, I made five at once. I then used black poster board to make boxes, and lined them with bits of satin and velvet wrapped around some quilt batting for padding. The stickers are print-and-cut designs from the Silhouette online store that I printed on white label paper and cut with my Silhouette machine.
I also made spell books inspired by the free download at A Lemon Squeezy Home. Her cute version is formatted for a 4X6 photo album, but I didn’t have any albums so I followed the link in her post to the list of spells, copied and pasted them into Photoshop and formatted them to make booklets that could use 8.5 X 11 paper folded in half. I used the Hogwarts crest image from the Silhouette store again on the cover, but just printed right on the cardstock instead of onto a sticker.
The kids had a blast on Christmas Eve running around performing their “spells” !
I am so thankful for the potions kit ideas I found at Mrs. Nespy’s World. She threw a fabulous Harry Potter party and came up with all sorts of neat potions. Â I used almost all her ideas to put together these kits, which were admittedly time-consuming, but pretty inexpensive in the end.
I spent about a month or two saving empty jars and other containers to use for the potion ingredients, and then bought enough of the ingredients (stuff like baking soda, vinegar, food coloring) to make two kits. The most time-consuming part probably was making the labels, but that could be done more quickly had I not made different shapes, etc.  The blog mentioned above even had a free download for all the potions, but I re-typed them because I wasn’t sure if my little  niece would be able to read the decorative font she used, and I combined some of the student handbook potions with the “master” potions.
I happened to have two sturdy boxes from Lands End (snow boots!) that worked perfectly to hold all the ingredients. I used more stickers to cover up the Lands End labels and to decorate the box, and tucked some bubble wrap among the glass bottles to protect them a bit.
I was waiting to give Parker his kit on Christmas day, but I knew he’d love it because when he saw his cousins’ he kept saying “We should do this!” We’ve done a few of the potions so far, and I think he enjoyed them 🙂
Wow this is such a great thing to do for you son and his cousins! I’ve loved all the crafty things you’ve been doing in December I have just been too busy to comment but I wanted to say thank you I have really enjoyed seeing everything!!
[…] Also for my niece, I made a doll-sized Hogwarts outfit, since she is a big Harry Potter fan. (See previous posts for her Harry Potter birthday gifts and last year’s Christmas gifts). […]
Hi…do you still have the reformatted spells and potions books? I’m having difficulty figuring out how to do that. I am hosting our annual Cousin Camp this weekend, and our theme is HP. 🙂
Hi there! I’m planning to begin working on this now and make a kit like this for my daughter for Christmas! Thank you SO much for sharing your ideas and links to the other bloggers/writers and their ideas and tutorials as well. Do you happen to have a list of the potion names you gave the bottles? And did you have the actual recipes or just the book that shows what each spell does? If you were to do this again, would you do anything differently? We’re thinking about getting a treasure chest type of box from the craft store to finish and distress to have for the container to hold the potions/spellbook. Thanks for any response! LOVE this post!
Hi Nicole! You’re very welcome. See the link above for where I got the recipes (or click HERE) The other link HERE has the spell book. So the spell book is just a list of what a wizard would say for a certain spell (obviously, they don’t really work!) For the bottles, I just labeled them with the names of the ingredients from the potion recipes in the above link. In other words, “Dragon Spit” is dishwashing liquid, “Mandrake Root” is baking soda etc. Does that make sense? I think your treasure chest idea is a great one.
[…] Homemade Potions Kit […]
this is amazing!! i will be doing this for my friend, she loves harry potter!! thank you so much for the ideas!! love it
HI there,
I am having trouble finding the harry potter sticker images. Do you have a link for that at the silhouette site? All searches are coming up empty. Thanks!
I just tried to find them, too, and couldn’t. It appears they are no longer available. Your best bet might be to google “Harry Potter” and “printable crests” and import those into the Silhouette software and trace them.
[…] My son is a massive Harry Potter fan, so I decided to make him is very own potions kit for his birthday this year. I was inspired by Stitch Craft Creations […]
Love this idea! I am currently making this kit for a christmas present. Just wondering what size box you used and how many bottles/jars you managed to fit in?
[…] 7. Harry Potter Potions Kit […]