The Crafty One

Me and one of my friends Alex dressed up to go to the midnight release of the new Harry Potter movie Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. The movie was amazing and the best part of the night was the looks that we got when we showed up to the movie theater in costume! I'll post pictures in the photo gallery and give everyone the info in the morning. Now it's time for sleep!

edit:

Personally I thought that the movie was amazing! It was very accurate and went along witht he book very well. I have posted pictures in the photo gallery

Ingredients

Sour Jolly Ranchers

Citric Acid Powder

Sugar

Lemon Juice

Directions

Mix sugar and Citric Acid together. Use more sugar than Citric Acid (it's really really really sour)

Dip unwrapped Jolly Ranchers in Lemon juice then coat in the sour sugar mixture

Enjoy your sour candy

      Since first grade my best friend Tori's mother would make these for our birthday(mine is august 27th and Tori's is august 29th) and bring them to school. They turned into somewhat of a tradition for us and our classmates. I grew up in a tiny school, there were only 26 kid in my entire grade, so Tori's mom ended up bringing the wands at least once a year from first grade till our senior year.

Ingredients:

Almond Bark, any flavour

24 pretzel rods

Sprinkles

 Directions:

1. Melt the Almond Bark either in the microwave or on the stove

2. Coat most of the pretzel with the Almond Bark

3. Roll in sprinkles

4. Enjoy

Ingredients:

2 cups sugar

8 tablespoons of butter

½ teaspoon vanilla extract (or imitation)

1½ cups water

Additionally, a candy thermometer is required

Directions:

Step 1: In a medium saucepan, mix all ingredients and melt over medium heat until sugar is completely dissolved.

Step 2: Without furter stirring, boil until mixture reaches 290°F on your candy thermometer.

Step 3: Pour mixture into a greased or buttered 9"x12" pan and let cool until almost firm to the touch.

Step 4: Score surface into 2" squares with a sharp knife, but do not cut completely.

Step 5: When cool, break into pieces (this should be easier if toffee was properly scored).

Step 6: Enjoy! Makes 1¼ pounds of toffee.

recipe from www.mugglenet.com

Ingredients:

½ cup light cream or evaporated milk

¾ cup firmly packed brown sugar

¼ teaspoon salt

4 ounces of unsweetened chocolate

2 tablespoons unsalted butter

1/3 cup molasses

Directions:

Step 1: In a large bowl, mix cream, brown sugar and salt together.

Step 2: In a saucepan, melt the chocolate and butter together. Remove from heat and add molasses.

Step 3: Add the chocolate mixtures and cream mixtures together. Pour mixture into a pan and let cool.

Step 4: Cut into squares after cooled and serve. Enjoy!

Recipe from www.muggnet.com

Ingredients:

Gummy Frogs

semi-sweet milk chocolate pieces (can be substituted with white or dark chocolate, depending on your taste)

Directions:

Step 1: Cover a plate with wax paper. This will be used later, after the frogs are dipped.

Step 2: Place chocolate pieces into a microwave safe bowl, and place bowl in microwave.

Heat at a medium heat in thirty second intervals, stirring after each one, until the chocolate is completely melted. Be careful not to burn it!

Step 3: Carefully dip the back end of a gummy frog into the chocolate. Place dipped frog onto the wax paper-covered plate.

Step 4: Repeat step 3 with the remaining gummy frogs.

Step 5: Place the plate of dipped frogs into refrigerator, until the chocolate hardens.

recipe from www.mugglenet.com

Ingredients:

1 quart of water

1 cup of honey

1/2 teaspoon of nutmeg

1/4 teaspoon of ginger

1/2 teaspoon almond extract

Directions:

Step 1: Add all ingredients to a pan, and bring to a boil on the stove.

Step 2: As it begins to boil, a skin will form on the surface. Scrape it off, and continue to stir the contents of the pan until the scum ceases to form.

Step 3: Allow to cool, and enjoy!

Recipe from www.mugglenet.com

Ingredients:

1 cup (8 oz) club soda or cream soda

½ cup (4 oz) butterscotch syrup (ice cream topping)

½ tablespoon butter

Directions:

Step 1: Measure butterscotch and butter into a 2 cup (16 oz) glass. Microwave on high for 1 to 1½ minutes, or until syrup is bubbly and butter is completely incorporated.

Step 2: Stir and cool for 30 seconds, then slowly mix in club soda. Mixture will fizz quite a bit.

Step 3: Serve in two coffee mugs or small glasses; a perfectly warm Hogwarts treat for two!

Recipe from www.mugglenet.com

     Okay. So here it is. The tutorial that I have been trying to make for about a week now. With the new Harry Potter movie coming out in a couple of weeks me and my friends decided that we would go to the movies on opening night. Though we aren't going to wear costumes my friends still want to carry wands to the theater. Of course being the one who does crafts all the time I was elected to get them for everyone. Me and my friends aren't the richest people in the world and we really don't want to spend all that money on the nice wands from websites like Noble Collectoin, Alivans, Whirlwood, Whimsic Alley, etc... And we didn't want to make them out of paper like some people have done with the help of dadcando.com. Some of the pictures in this tutorial are large.

      So naturally I went to the local Hobby Lobby and wondered the isles until an idea came to my head. Wooden dowels and polymer clay! So I grabbed a couple of wooden dowels from the rack and saw a small plastic bag containing precut wooden dowels in varying thicknesses. So I put the long wooden dowels back and grabbed a couple bags of the precut ones. I made my way down the clay isle until I found some polymer clay that wouldn't dry in the air. I grabbed a box of plain white Sculpey and then headed to find some different colored paints and stains for the wands.

     Now for my personal wand, and the wand i'll be using for the tutorial, I wanted to make a replica of Cedric Diggory's wand from Goblet of Fire. Now I am and will always be a Gryffindor at heart but there's something about the simplicity of Cedric's wand that makes it really awesome to me. So I started my research. It was simple enough, just a long stick with symbols carved in the end. So I tried to find a good picture of the symbols online, nearly impossible. The best picture I found was this one.

I know, not a lot of help. But after hours of using the amazing power of Google I found a user on youtube who had an official Cedric Diggory wand who shot a video of his wands, that's right...you guessed it, he showed the symbols on the handle of the wand! So, I sketched out what I wanted the wand to look like and started on my process.

What you will Need

Wooden Dowels

Sculpey

Acrylic Paint

Minwax Wood Stain

Minwax Polyurethane

Sandpaper

Candle

Pencil Sharpener

Pencil

Exacto Knife

Calligraphy Ink

Rubbing Alcohol

Terry Cloth Rag

Paper Towels

Ultra Fine Tipped Sharpies

Magic Cores

Basilisk Fang

Veela Hair

Unicorn Tail Hair

Pheonix Ash

Boomslang Fang

Step One: Take one of the wooden dowels from the bag and use the pencil sharpener and sandpaper to smooth down the end to a nice rounded tip.

then use sandpaper to round it out

Step Two: Cedric's wand is interesting, the tip of his wand is black and it fades into a light yellowish brown near the middle of the wand.

     So here is where the Calligraphy Ink comes in handy. Getting some of the ink on a paper towel I spread the ink on the tip of the wand and continued to paint the dowel about 2/3 of the way down the wands "shaft". This gave me a really harsh line between the black area of the wand and the not black area. So with a clean paper towel and some rubbing alcohol I got the ink to "fade" from the tip to the handle area of the wand and created the look that I was happy with.

Step Three: The next thing I had to do was make the handle. Sure Cedric's wand is simply a stick that gets thinner near the end but the dowels I bought dont get thicker on one end, here's where the sculpey comes in. I molded the sculpey onto the end of the wand to make one end thicker than the other and then molded it to gently slope into the wooden dowel to create the shape that I needed.

Step Four: As I previously mentioned Sculpey is soft until you bake it. So following the directions on the back of the box I baked the wand at 275 for about fifteen minutes.

(Wand tip is placed in a lump of Sculpey not only to keep it off of the baking surface, but as a place to keep the wand when it's not being used. White lump in the back corner of the baking surface is a rolled out peice of sculpey to test the carving, painting and staining of the handle.)

TIP: Let everything cool off before you start to work with it. Not only is it hot, but Sculpey is still slightly pliable while it's hot.

Step Five: Mixing together several different colors of paint ( Lemon Yellow,Yellow Ochre, Burn Umber, Mars Black, Titanium White, and Pure Gold). Using the pictures that I got from the internet as well as the sketches from the youtube video I drew the symbols on the clay handle of the wand to make sure the dimensions of the symbols looked right on the wand. I used the Exacto knife to carve the symbols into the clay. After I had all of the symbols carved i used a fine tipped sharpie marker to color the carved out areas black. Happy with the results I opened the can of Minwax Polyurethane and gave the entire wand two coats. Let the polyurethane dry and then your done! 

Pictures of the finished product!