Birthday, Harry Potter style

May brings the start of Birthdays in our family, including my eldest girl so my mind starts to whir into action to whip up the obligatory Birthday Badge!

As her present this year we planned to spend the day at the Harry Potter tour in London again, so as her chosen house via Pottermore is Hufflepuff, it seemed appropriate to make one that she could wear with pride on the trip!

I made a cardboard circle for the back structure and tacked the gathered ribbon around the edge. Then tacked on cut lengths to make the ends, then covered the front with a circle of black felt.

I was going to add felt numbers to it but then I had a cut out of the Hufflepuff badger left (I printed these out and stuck them onto yellow paper cups for the party tea!) so decided to use it up with a piece of yellow card.

I got a bit carried away though as this rosette turned out to be a bit large! So I quickly whipped up a smaller felt number badge, as I thought she might feel embarrassed to wear the rosette (which she did, but I put it on our bag instead!)

She did wear this one!

Me and my daughter share the same birthday so we did talk about how we would be able to be the lucky people who get to 'open THE door' into the tour but as it got closer to the day she was adamant that she wasn't going to do it! And sadly on the day she didn't want to do it :(

Have to be next year! We did get an awesome momento of the day though in that we all crammed into the Ford Anglia for a family photo!

I had then also worked on a pattern from the recently purchased Charmed Knits book, which details Harry Potter inspired knitting projects, such as jumpers, cloaks, owls and socks.

It's a really good book for knitting HP fans and I decided on a wand cozy, as I thought it would be useful to put her imitation wand in!

I used King Cole Galaxy yarn (Saturn colourway) which has little sequins in and it was really easy, my other daughter want's one and I'm tempted too!

We all had a fab magical day and we both got birthday badges from the staff!

My favourite item from the tour last time was this painting of some sort of knitted Hippogriff.

It didn't seem to make much sense but appeared in the concept art section and was by Adam Brockbank

Well this time I spotted an actual prop of it, so we asked one of the guides what it was from and got told that it was going to appear in a scene that got cut, it would have been an abandoned toy left in a campsite of destruction, well I'm determined to try and make a copy of it - just for personal use only of course! It really looks like a homemade toy a wizard child would have, if only they sold them in the shop!

Speaking of the shop, I was very restrained and only got a hoodie Hogwarts sweatshirt, it was £39 but it looks good quality and is not too OTT!

My only niggle about the day is that having been twice now, I'm not sure it would be as exciting to go again unless extra content was added, I would love to go at Christmas to see the decorations though.