Harry Potter Golden Snitch Valentine Box

As promised on Tuesday here is the Valentine box that my daughter made for this year. It is her last year of elementary school so this will be her last Valentine Box.

She is a total potterhead so she opted to make a Harry Potter themed Valentine Box. She had several ideas but this was the one she finally settled on. If you remember reading about our problems with using a punch ball in the Pokeball post, we had the same issues but this didn't claps quite as far because it was smaller already.

To make the wings she taped cardboard from a 12 pack box and then paper mache paid the taped joint area. Then she paper mache paid over the entire Wings to add texture to them as well.

She decided to use a paste made of flour and water where as my son used liquid starch as his paste. The paste she made seem to shrink a bit more and made it more textured. But it did seem to be a thicker and sturdier project with less coats. The final coat she had to do with starch because she needed to have a smoother area in order to put the letters on.

The letters are made using my Silhouette machine using the font I bought from the silhouette design store called lightning.

Pokeball Valentine Box

I really want to tell you that this was super easy to make but we learned a few new things about paper mache that we had not known before. We had thought we would try using punch balloons because they are typically more around then a regular balloon but found that as we got additional layers on it would compress in make it all bumpy. To be honest after our third layer when it started to compress it looked horrible. We had spent so much time working on it I wasn't sure how to get it smoothed out and look like a ball again.

What's a combination of ideas from my husband and myself I ended up putting a regular balloon inside after I quickly soaps the entire thing in water to soften it. Then I blew up the balloon inside the paper mache until it was inflated enough to pop out the bumps and give it around shape again.

It had outstretched some of the weak spots so we ended up putting on a layer over the weak spots and then another final layer over the entire thing.

The red is actually red tissue paper and the white is white tissue paper except for the center of the Pokeball which is painted white. The black stripe around is all painted black.

As long as this Valentine Box makes transportation to and from school for Valentine's Day my son is hoping to save it and make some kind of lid for it to be able to store stuff in. If it makes it home we will add a sealer to the inside and outside which will also help make it stronger. He is hoping he can alter this to use as a Cloverbud fair project for 4-H.

On Thursday, I will share the one that my daughter made. They didn't get them finished until Friday night, so we couldn't share them earlier.