Harry Potter Party: The Stamps

Oh the stamps, the stamps! I have found a new hobby in carving my own stamps to use for various things. I spent three months finding the images and carving the stamps. I made twenty-seven for this event, and would have loved to make more if only I had time. I might still! Only two stamps are missing in the above photo due to the fact that my eldest sister has borrowed them. They are the stamps that I carved for the Hogwarts wax seals that I made for the invitations, and the Gringotts stamp made for the money bags.

Ron, Harry, and Hermione

I put a lot of effort into carving these and really pushed myself to carve more and more detail. It was kind of funny, I was sitting there thinking

Hogwarts Castle

that I wasn't going to be able to do a good enough job on the carves because they are so detailed. I was scared to start carving because I didn't want to mess up. I actually had to tell myself to just start and take my time. It can be difficult to see the detail of the stamps in these photos, especially since they have been stamped so many times over now and they have ink in all the little crevices. We cleaned them up the best we could after the event, but we could only get so much of the ink off of them. It doesn't help that Carma, Joyce, and I then went and stamped them in our logbooks in the various different colors we wanted to use.

Below are some scanned images of the stamps that were hidden around our property for the guests to go and find, with the help of some clues, of course. Some of the ink colors don't quite show up, but you get the main idea. Also, some of the images didn't stamp very clearly, but I went with the pages that had the best results.

So, all of these stamps were hidden in plastic boxes, painted so that they would blend more easily into the surroundings. The boxes are shown below.

I then had to type up clues to give them so that they would be able to find the boxes. I tried to incorporate anything from the Harry Potter movies and books that I could when writing the clues. I even made one of them into a poem, and believe me, it took awhile because writing has never been one of my strong points.

As you were able to see above, one of the images is of a dementor. Those who are Potter fans will know that the best way to recover from being near a dementor is to eat chocolate. Therefore, I made some chocolates, wrapped them up, and made labels for them.