Preparations

About the week before the first session of camp, I started having friends over to my house every day of the week to help prepare the final supplies for Harry Potter Camp. The following are the things that we made ahead of time and overviews of how we made them.

Wands

These were pretty straightforward. I bought wooden dowel rods from Michael's in two similar widths, used an electric sander to taper the ends a bit (not too sharp though), and spray painted them all with a variety of colors such as bronze, copper, gold, silver, and black. I blended some of the colors to make each wand unique, and toned down the sparkle of most of them with the black. They looked really good, but I'm not sure if all the shimmery-ness was over the top or fine, and if I had had brown spray paint on hand I would have tried it. You could also use wood varnish, but I was short on time.

Then my friends all brought hot glue guns, and everyone just got free reign to create deigns on the wands with glue. Once it hardened, I had metallic permanent markers and we colored on top of the glue. They turned out so great! Afterwards, we pulled up the wand information on Pottermore and each wandmaker wrote the specifications of their wand on a slip of parchment paper and tied it in a scroll around the wand.

Resources: This is instructions for making wands from paper! And shows the hot-glue technique we used. http://summercampprogramdirector.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/Make-an-awesome-Harry-Potter-wand-from-a-sheet-of-.pdf

Books

We hand-made potions and spellbooks for each student, and it was a serious pain in the butt! Not recommended if you have to make more than about 10-15. I had written and borrowed potions and spells to put in the books, which we had to print out page by page. (I can't include the actual books because Google Docs screws up my Word formatting but the potion instructions can be found on the "Potions" post.) Then we used colored cardstock and yarn to create a simple cover for the "Standard Book of Spells Grade 1" and cut out pieces of cardboard for the covers of the potions book. The potions books were way more complicated because the cardboard had to be covered in scrapbook paper and lined with colored paper, and then the pages were hot-glued in, which was not a long-term book binding solution.

They looked cool though, because each book had different patterned paper for the covers.
Resources: Making felt-covered books would also be cool! --> http://www.bluecricketdesign.net/2012/03/harry-potter-party-by-just-another-day-in-paradise.html

Goblin War Documentary

This was an intense afternoon of filming with some of our friends and my siblings who volunteered to act in a homemade documentary for History of Magic class! It was actually a lot of fun, although I didn't have a very clear idea of what I wanted them to do most of the time, but this was one of the things I personally am most proud of that came out of Harry Potter Camp! Watch the video on the "History of Magic" blog post page.

T-shirts

We screen printed by hand all of the camp tshirts, which were black and said "Harry Potter Camp 2013" on the front in silver letters. On the back we used printable iron-on things with each kid's house. The houses were ones Georgia and I made up, see the "Sorting" post for more info about that.

Letters

For each session of camp, we drove to each kid's house the afternoon/evening before camp started with their acceptance letters, which were taped to their doors. For the second session, I found the awesome idea to use white balloons with Hedwig drawn on them as delivery owls. We also included some important items in the envelopes besides their letters: supply lists, Gringott's vault keys, and train tickets. Green glitter would also be a fun idea as "floo powder" to transport them to Diagon Alley! We sealed the letters with crayon wax and candle wax (candle wax works better), different each time, and we used Georgia's Hufflepuff seal from the Wizarding World of Harry Potter.
Resources:
Ticket: http://www.ericnielson.us/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/ticket-to-hogwarts.png
Supply lists (by me): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0B_YYwKCxFE1vZlo2R0VYOGFnR3M/edit?usp=sharing