A Birthday Project......Potter Style.

I have put The Leaky Cauldron aside for a couple of weeks because I am going to try to create a couple of special birthday projects for my two wonderful eldest children.

I saw these picture boxes in Hobbycraft on sale a couple of months ago and thought they would be ideal.

 They are quite sturdy and a good size with a depth of about two and half inches. I have taken one of them apart today and intend to use them as a bit of guinea pig in my attempts with paperclay.

All my children grew up with the Harry Potter books and they remain among the very few books my non-reading eldest son has ever read. So I have planned a little Potter surprise for him.

When he was trawling through Potter miniatures on Etsy at Christmas in an attempt to find me a Christmas present he came across this:

Luna Lovegood by Linsminis

and she really made him laugh. He then discovered that there was a whole range of Potter characters and spent a lot of time trying to persuade me to include them in Diagon Alley.

They are a tiny two and a half inches tall so just perfect for a fun Potter picture box.

I am going to line the frame in paperclay in an attempt to create the stone walls of Hogwarts and then each character (I have ordered six) will have its own floating shelf of stained and distressed balsa.

I have never used any type of clay like this before so it will be a bit of a learning curve but I have been reading up on the pros and cons so I hope to avoid too many mistakes!!

It has to be ready by the 12th of March and the dolls haven't arrived yet, my fault I thought of the idea at the last minute, but Lin has been really helpful.

I will have to make the interior without the dolls and then hope it all fits together!