The Cursed Child Release Party – Throwing a Harry Potter Party

Last updated on 29 August 2017

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“My geekness is a-quivering.” – Scorpius Malfoy

It’s been a few days now, and still The Cursed Child is on the forefront of my mind. It hasn’t really left me since Sunday, and nor should. We were waiting a long time for that book, and it was magical. On Monday we took a first look at the Cursed Child and I mentioned a few times that some friends and I had got together to read through the play aloud. My good friend (let’s call him C) and I put together a magical place, full of Wizarding wonders, and it really was the best afternoon.

Today I thought I’d share with you what we did in the house to set up for all our friends coming over. It was so much fun putting everything together, and it made the lead up to the actual release even more exciting.

The Party and the Decor

Our release party and play reading started at 1:30pm, so after I picked up the books with C at 11:01am, we headed back to their place and started decorating. I had printed a bunch of things in the week prior, and made everyone wands with labels and boxes, and bought so much candy from the supermarket they gave me weird looks at the checkout.

“Potter Party,” was all I said.

He nodded. He got it. We had a moment.

On the front door we stuck bricks and ‘Platform 9 3/4’ sign. The books and the wands were on a great wine rack (of course) in the entrance, with a sign above them that said Olivander’s. There were Hogwarts House shields on the walls, fairy lights hanging from the ceiling (closest thing we could do for floating candles), we covered books with Hogwarts text books and other magical tomes and piled them high, and we had the actual HP series (2 sets) and also Tales of Beedle the Bard, Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, and Quidditch Through the Ages.

On the toilet lid we stuck ‘This way to the Ministry of Magic’, and we popped a picture of Moaning Myrtle on the bathroom mirror. I had also set up my Philosopher’s Stone Illustrated Edition, my Marauder’s Map (and the map mug), and Chocolate Frog case for extra magic.

We had set up a projector, too, and hooked it up to the laptop, and projected onto the wall for the entire duration of the play reading we had a montage of all 8 movie trailers playing, with the music from the movies playing over the top, quiet in the background as we read. We even had multiple trunks about the place.

A few days before I had made a tiny crocheted beanie complete with house elf ears for my friends’ 10 week old baby. She looked hilariously cute in it.

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Food and Drinks

For drinks we had Gillywater (literally just water), Polyjuice Potion (Mountain Dew), Gurdyroot Infusion (cranberry juice), Exploding Lemonade (lemonade), and I made butterbeer in mason jars for everyone.

If anyone’s interested, to make the butterbeer I used creaming soda, a splash of buttery syrup, and a tiny drop of maple essence. On top was whipped cream with butter flavouring, sprinkled with chopped up Worther’s Originals. Which of course I forgot to take a photo of. *rolls eyes*

The food trolley was my favourite. I had scoured the supermarket sweets aisle for things that were as similar to the Hogsmeade and Hogwarts sweets and foods as I could, and printed out little labels for everything. Some people even made pumpkin pasties and treacle tarts. Ohmygosh I love my friends.

 

The whole setting made the play reading even more great than it was already going to be. While I ate a lot of sugar that day and not much else, it was a crazy good time.

Tomorrow I’ll tell you all about the play reading, and the day after that we’ll launch into a review of the actual book. It turns out Harry Potter week is stretching into Harry Potter Fortnight (but we’re all fine with that, aren’t we?).

Ever thrown a Harry Potter party? What kinds of things did you have?