So here I am again, with part two of I made a thing!
In my last post I showed you how I made some of those fancy book boxes you can buy in craft shops that cost an absolute fortune! I ended up making three of them for my niece and nephews for halloween and I wanted to show you how they turned out.
So as I said, my niece is a big Harry Potter fan so that became the basis of my theme this year. The previous years have all been along potions themes so I thought a change was in order. I mean, I could have done potions boxes and ingredients but it's all so similar to what I did before. Instead I decided to take the traditional sweets from the series and "make" those to put inside the box.
I picked three of the Hogwarts Textbooks from the first book, The Philosophers Stone, and painted the boxes to look like them. Before I started, I took the white painted boxes and covered then in tissue paper and glue to give them a nice, old book texture. Once I'd picked the books I wanted I did a google search for images of the covers, resized them and printed them out. I used acrylic paint to paint them in the colour of the book. I then used carbon paper to trace the deesign on the front of the boxes and filled in the detail with black and metallic paintmarkers. I personally like the Edding 780 ones, I think they have the smoothest and most vibrant coverage. Here's how they turned out:
It's been so long, I really don't have the habit of updating regularly it seems. In my defence I have now entered the final year of my PhD and the resultant panic that comes with that realization... I mean oh my... in about a year i'm going to have a doctorate and be out in the big wide world. Now is also the time I've had to start looking into what I'll do after, I think a Post-Doctoral position would be an excellent choice, but also slightly terrifying!
Anyway, I know this blog is called The Graduate Eats but this post is not about food... well not entirely. You see, I also really like working with my hands to make things. Infact before I set on my path to become an academic I actually wanted to train to be a set designer or prop maker, event's conspired against me however and I ended up not being able to do that, but I still love it as a hobby. As it coming upto Halloween I set about my tradition of making a gift for my nieces and nephews. Every year I make them something for halloween, filled with sweets and treats. Everything is hand-made and personal to them and they love it. It helps me feel closer to them too since I don't get to see them as often as I'd like. This will be the fourth year since I moved away and started this tradition. The first year I made them little coffins filled with sweets, the second year I made them potions kits filled with all kinds of 'ingredients', last year I made them a potions shop filled with all their potioneering needs.
This year however, I learned that my 10 year old niece loves Harry Potter, which is totally awesome because I'm a huge Harry Potter geek, so my joy at sharing this with her is immense. So, with that in mind I decided to make them spell books from the series and fill them with the traditional sweets from Harry Potter, chocolate frogs, peppermint toads, fizzing whizbees, sherbert lemons and so on. Now I know you can buy papier mache book boxes from most craft stores but boy are they expensive, like seriously expensive. Instead I decided to make my own, since I'm pretty good with my hands and all that I figured it shouldn't be too hard and it's really not. I also noticed that finding detailed tutorials on how to do it is very hard so I though I'd share with you how to make them so you can do them in future. This is the first time that I've ever done a photo tutorial so I hope you'll forgive me any mistakes I make but do ask questions if you want!
