Fancy Dress: A Harry Potter Party

I'm not alone in my friendship group with my love, nay obsession, with Harry Potter, nor my love of fancy dress. So it's a surprise that it's taken this long for one of us to have a Harry Potter party, or for us to dress up as characters from it. Last weekend my Harry Potter fancy dress party dreams came true.




Bella and the Birthday Girl: Vicky and Viki!

My fellow Harry Potter enthusiast, and younger sister to Bestie-Kim, Victoria chose this as a theme for her 30th birthday.

Squeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee..... where's my broomstick?

A few months back we all received wax-sealed envelopes containing our personalised invites - "letters" from Hogwarts, welcoming us for our first day of school and a ticket for Platform 9 3/4. By personalised, I mean we were all allocated a character so there were no duplicates (you see now why we get on - it's not just the HP, or the YA fiction, the fact we've virtually grown up together, or the enthusiasm for party planning... it's the dedication to a theme and attention to detail. Amazing skills. Amazing). I was lucky enough to have been allocated one of my favourite characters (not to mentioned being played by one of my fave actresses) - Bellatrix Lestrange.

YESSSSS!

Itty, bitty, baby Potter.

Yesssss!!

I nabbed myself a faux leather basque from eBay (bad move - it came with a "bonus" free faux leather thong, and I now receive regular updates on their S&M gear as eBay assumes they are one ofmy "favourite sellers". Hmph) that wasn't dissimilar to Batman body armour, some whale-net tights, arm sleeve thingys, a wand, a replica necklace and VAT of hair products.

I tonged, teased, tore and generally abused my hair in to some semblance of a Bellatrix style, smudged the make up I'd worn to a day-party at another friend's house (yup - I'm THAT popular - two parties in one day. Yeah!), added some dark lippie and I was good to go...

... until I looked in the mirror and realised that if I broke down I'd be mistaken for a sex worker.

So rummaged in my cupboards and fancy dress box and came up with a strapless sundress which I wiggled in to as a slightly more demure skirt (the previous one had a split and with the thigh high boots, was wholly unnacceptable for "school") and then I was away.

Sadly, my "official" Bellatrix wand didn't turn up in time so I had to bluff it with a replica of Harry's wand instead. Don't judge me Potter-Purists.

Also don't judge me for not applying a temporary Dark Mark tattoo - I had a christening the next day, and I don't think it would have gone down too well!

So, anyway, here are some pictures of the amazing details and the brilliant, brilliant costumes...

A dark mark

Madam Hooch and He Who Must Not Be Named (who lost his mask!)

Harry and Ginny

Lupin and Luna

welcome to the party!

The Grey Lady (a.k.a. The Birthday Girl) in her Dia

Drinks in Diagon Alley

Dobby




Bellatrix and Fleur

McGonagall, Dumbledore and Moaning Myrtle

Enemies of the Heir BEWARE!

Snape and Fleur

Lupin, Harry and Fleur

Hagrid and Fluffy

Hagrid and Harry

Harry in Diagon Alley (looking for beers!)

potions, papers and horcruxes

Lupin got a bit wild after midnight!

Stay away from the dungeons... unless you're Slytherin...

Propoganda

Quidditch rings

Nice to meet you Sirius

This is strictly a non-smoking area.

Snitches

SORTED!

This way, sports fans...

Catching up on the news...

Tonks and Trelawney

The Tri-Wizard Cup

Oh how I miss Harry.

Oh, what's that you say? Another film in the pipeline, not to mention suggestions for my new fave YA-Fiction-Franchise boy crush to be included in the line up...

Waaaahoooooooooooooooooo!




Obsession: Collective Nouns

I'm a geek about a lot of things. Ok, I'm a geek about most things. But this is next obsession is not just beyond geeky, it's

beyond

awesome.

I love, love, LOVE collective nouns. I don't know why, maybe it's because of my obsession with themes and collections? Maybe it's because they are so clever in their description? Maybe it's because they evoke such great visuals in my imagination?

Whatever the reason, I just love thinking about them, discovering new ones, and speculating on what as-yet-unknown ones may be (a dither of lawyers anyone?!?), so when I discovered this website I felt a little faint with excitement.

A website dedicated to collective nouns? Oh good lord.

A website dedicated to collective nouns and corresponding pictures? WOW!

A website dedicated to collective nouns and corresponding pictures that you can purchase and put on your wall as nerdy artwork? I nearly died...

A website dedicated to collective nouns, corresponding pictures that you can purchase and put on your wall as nerdy artwork, created by the graphic designers from Harry Potter?!?!?!?! *THUD*

That was me fainting.

Screw Flora and the Flamingo.

A Zeal of Zebras is my new favourite book.

Possibly my fave?

(I don't really mean that, I spoke too quickly. I will love them both equally)

Unlikely style icon: Fleur Delacour

We all know that I’m a massive Harry Potter fan. I love everything about it. The themeing, the storylines, the cinematography, the characters, the actors, the fantasy, the costumes, the morals… I love it all. It’s not often I look to Harry Potter for fashion inspiration though. (Emma Watson at the premiers aside, of course. She's an actress, not a character!)

Costumes – yes. Fashion? No.

Until I went to Harry Potter Studios, that is. (Check out my review here)

Obviously I loved the whole thing, the sets, the props, the tours, the background talks, the Butterbeer but to walk away with some real-life accessory motivation was rather surprising. Anyone who’s read the books or watched Clemence Poesy in the films will agree that, when it comes down to it Fleur Delacour is the only character who gets anything even remotely stylish to wear but I’ve never really thought about it in any detail. One of the charms of the stories, for me, is the fact that the costumes are so “authentic”. I’m not sure if that’s the right word, but you know what I mean – they’re not the clothes modern society wear, but not the clothes characters in your usual “fantasy” stories wear, they just seem to fit with the whole Harry Potter vision.

Seeing Fleur’s Beauxbatons uniform in the flesh was very exciting. That shade of blue is one of my favourite colours (also beloved of Marie Antoinette I think), I love a dress coat, I envy anyone that can wear a shoe-boot/high-vamp brogue (I have cankles), I want a reason to wear powder blue, leather driving gloves one day but most of all I am passionately in love with that amazing hat. On screen I loved it. In the flesh I had to resist the overwhelming urge to jump in, grab it and put it on my head. J'adore.

I’ve always loved a hat. I have literally hundreds of them. I was christened Viki the Hat by one of my friend’s dads at primary school because I was never without some kind of headgear. I can’t walk past a hat shop without stopping to look at the window display, and often spending far too long trying them all on. I used to stare jealously at the girls from the private school in my village that had to wear straw boaters to school every day. I wanted to don a hat on my wedding day (and was vetoed – resulting in two veils instead). I choose fancy dress costumes on the basis of incorporating a hat wherever possible. At my wedding my dad provided “traditional” head wear to guests according to their tables (named after cities Mr G and I had visited) as part of his speech, and I kept one of each in my memory box. I have never attended a wedding without wearing some kind of fancy head décor – even travelling all the way to Australia with a fascinator on my lap.

So it goes without saying that Fleur’s uniform hat rather high up my list of Highly Covetable Head Wear along with, amongst many, many others, a number of Royal wedding hats, Satine’s top hat in Moulin Rouge, Andie MacDowell’s hat in Four Weddings and a Funeral, Eliza's hat (and whole outfit) in My Fair Lady and Lara’s fur hat in Dr Zhivago.

I’ve found a seller on Etsy that makes one similar.

Is it really sad to buy one?

Out and about: Harry Potter Studio Tour

If you don't like Harry Potter, or you do and you are yet to finish the books/films, I suggest you stop reading now - this post will either infuriate you, or bore you!

When the first Harry Potter film was released it coincided with a family birthday and we all toddled off to watch it en masse. From that year on it became a family tradition to watch the films, queue for the books or snuggle up on the sofa to watch the DVDs together. This year, we were running out of Harry Potter related events and, short of heading off to Florida to visit Harry Potter Land, there’s not much more of the HP franchise left to explore. And then I remembered the Warner Brothers Harry Potter Studio Tour. 

I booked some tickets for a 2.30pm entrance for my dad’s birthday weekend online, and lucky I did. Two weeks later I went back and all but one were gone, so book in advance to avoid disappointment.

We arrived about an hour early at what felt like a retail park, were directed to a parking bay and, in our hurry to get inside declined the offer of a local pub recommendation for some lunch, opting instead for the on-site café. We braced ourselves for some hideous food but actually it wasn’t too bad… except for the (expectedly) hideous prices.

Anyway, enough about the car park and the café, on to the tour!

We queued, as directed, 20 minutes before our designated tour time, were welcomed in a cinema-style introduction by Daniel, Emma and Rupert and then walked through the grand Hogwarts doors and found ourselves in the Great Hall.

And the magic started.

The tour is self guided upon leaving the Great Hall but there are staff placed strategically around the studios to provide more in-depth information and even mini “tutorials” on the artefacts, sets and costumes.

The tour promises that “Secrets will be revealed” and they certainly are. Normally, I’d hate to see how the magic is created, as it could ruin the enchantment of the films, but in this instance it added to it.

Seeing the actual Great Hall was pretty breathtaking, seeing the (surprisingly small) costumes worn by the actors was fascinating, standing face-to-face with actors dressed as Death Eaters was cool (except for my mum who jumped out of her skin), and being (almost) in the sets and being able to touch some of the props gave me goosebumps.

I’ll admit it – I transformed in to an ultra-mega-super-Harry-Potter-geek-a-saurus. Think the entire cast of The Big Bang Theory all mashed up in to one giant Star Trek enthusiast, attending a Star Trek convention and having lunch with William Shatner. Yip. That was me.

My exceptionally nerdy brother actually commented, as I did a little squeal on discovering a particular item, that it was nice to “not be the nerd for once”. Stating that, in this environment, he felt almost “cool”. Whatevs.

This is a Mecca for Harry Potter geeks looking to prolong the love. I felt right at home.

Highlights for me (after much deliberation over dinner and in the car on the way home) were as follows:

• Standing in the Great Hall. The ACTUAL Great Hall. OMG! I almost cried.
• Walking along Diagon Alley and poring over the intricate window displays. So real. I know the names of the shops along this fictional street almost as well as the stores along Chelmsford high street.
• A rather detailed lecture about a number of key characters’ wands, including the individual aesthetics and qualities of each. Very interesting with some very well-thought out arguments even if it was all completely made up!
• Sampling Butterbeer which, pleasantly, wasn’t as gross as I imagined it to be!
• Looking for the cast names in the Wand Room
• And last but not least, spending the best part of an hour walking around and around and around the scale model of Hogwarts. It took my breath away. Where I held my tears back int he Great Hall, here I was not so restrained!

My least favourite bit? The gift shop. I wanted to buy everything. Sadly I’m not a billionaire (or an eight year old) so I had to restrain myself. In the end I bought some tongue-in-cheek books JKR wrote for Comic Relief, Quidditch through the Ages and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, to add to my HP book shelf, alongside The Tales of Beedle the Bard and the original seven books.

We headed over to The Grove Hotel, about a five minute drive away (and apparently where some of the cast stayed during filming - squeeeeeal), for some cocktails, in-depth Harry Potter related discussions and dinner.

I’m now planning to watch the box set back-to-back and annoy everyone with lots of pausing and shrieks of “I'VE SEEN THAT!” whilst pointing at the screen.

Overall, a GREAT day out for HP fans old and young. Who wants to come with me when I go back? I’ll sort out our costumes…

Travel information can be found here and tickets can be bought here.