Harry Potter Paper Bunting & Ornaments

Another year, another round of the Harry Potter Holiday Swap!  This year I had 3 partners, and created a wider mix of items than I have in previous years, including a banner, wooden ornaments, glitter ornaments, and potions bottles.  I'm going to post the holiday themed items here, and the potions bottles tomorrow.

My friend Edel requested some sort of banner or garland, so I created one out of book pages from an old copy of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.  The 3 part design was bought from the Silhouette store online, and the paper pieces were all cut on my Silhouette, before being assembled with twine & sparkle yarn, as well as some large hole glass beads between each snowflake.  There are 20 snowflakes all together on the strand, and I included a few extra of the cut pages and backing, without the light blue snowflake on them.  Each snowflake & frame is about 4" across, and the whole thing is a few yards long. 

I knew I wanted to make an Amortentia ornament for Kira, but was nervous about doing a new technique and possibly messing up her ornament, so I did a practice Felix Felicias one first.  I created these from a tutorial online that utilized alcohol inks, which I happened to have on hand.  The words were cut out on my Silhouette Cameo, and the tops were decorated with a chain maile collar of rings, and charms in corresponding colors, with shamrocks and celtic knots for the liquid luck potion, and hearts for the Amortentia love potion.

The last set of ornaments almost didn't happen.  I bought the wooden blanks on clearance after Christmas last year at Joann's.  They are laser cut wood ornament that come flat, and have slots to slide them together to create the 3-D hearts.  Being a Harry Potter nut, the first thing I thought when I saw the stags standing above hearts was 'OMG, look at the Patronus ornaments!' 

So I picked them up for less than $1 each, and put them away in my wood crafting stash to await this year's holiday crafting.  ...And completely forgot about them.  I bumped into them by accident when I went to pull out popsicle sticks to use in a recent candle making adventure, and knew I had to put them together. 

They are colored with Tim Holtz distress crayons, which have the feel of oil pastels, but unlike pastels, they don't smear all over the place.  You can smudge them if you do so on purpose, but on their own they don't smudge.  I colored them lightly with the crayons, then used wet Q-tips to blend the crayons into a watercolor effect.  I actually made 4, but somehow only have pictures of 3.