Harry Potter is the gift that keeps on giving at the moment. Rainy days can be filled with a film, bedtimes are for reading the books. We’ve even had a trip out to Alnwick Castle where scenes from Hogwarts were filmed. So it follows that we could add some magic to a craft day with our homemade Harry Potter potions.

If you want to make your own then all you need are some mini glass bottles in various sizes. We had some in my never-ending craft store but you can buy them in many craft stores. These are available at Baker Ross for example.

We had one larger bottle, a few medium sized and some tiny ones.

Creating potions

The first step was to fill them with our potions. We did a bit of research to see if we could find the names and colours of authentic potions from Harry Potter. I found some details in places like this fan wiki but others were a little more made up.

Once we had created a list of Harry Potter potions to make we turned the kitchen into a science lab for the afternoon. This was lots of fun for the kids and I gave them plenty of chance to test out different options to make potions of their own.

We used a combination of paints, food colouring, soap, glue and glitter.

Potion recipes

The largest bottle was a bright pink love potion. This was simply filled with slightly watered down pink poster paint.

Next we made the middle sized potions. We made the Polyjuice potion with watered down green paint mixed with a few drops of dark green food colouring. Dragon blood was mainly water with a small amount of red paint to leave a really watery consistency. To make the Unicorn blood potion we mixed liquid soap and water. We made this in a larger pot as it was very bubbly when mixed. This meant we had plenty left over. Once made we let it sit for a few minutes to settle. Then we slowly poured out the liquid into the bottles as we needed it, leaving the bubbles behind.

Next we filled the three smaller sized bottles. The first one we made was Jawbind. We mixed a few drops of blue food colouring in some of the soapy water. The Felix Felicis potion was supposed to be gold. We made it by mixing gold glitter with a few drops of water, however after a couple of days we found the glitter clumped together. After we did a little more testing we found that it was better to mix the glitter into an oil base as it mixed more evenly. The final one was unicorn blood. We mixed PVA glue into some of the soapy water to make a cloudy white liquid.

The two tiny bottles had the longest names. This became a bit of an issue when it came to the label, but more of that later! Befuddlement Draught was dark green. We mixed a few drops of green food colouring into water. The final potion was Draught of Living Death. This was pale lilac in colour and came from a few drops of lilac paint mixed into the soapy water.

Staining paper for labels

Next it was time to make some labels.

For the authentic aged look we tried out some experiments with tea and coffee stained paper. I made a mug of tea with three tea bags and a mug of coffee with 2 heaped spoonful’s of coffee.

We made some sheets by soaking a piece of paper in a baking tray. This created a fairly even coverage. We made other sheets by sponging them down with the liquid to make a more textured finish.

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To speed up drying I put each sheet into the oven on a low setting. We found that all the sheets dried out very quickly. Even those that had been soaked in liquid were dry in a few minutes. When we laid the sheets directly onto the oven shelf it created lined paper, which was unexpected but a good effect.

Making the labels

With the paper made the next step was to create the labels. The kids definitely enjoyed this part the most! We tore off small pieces of paper and burnt the edges over candles.

Now if your children are younger you may well prefer to do this stage entirely by yourself.

My tips for doing this? Firstly each child had their own candle so they had space to work safely. I put each one onto a chopping board so they weren’t working straight onto the kitchen work top. I gave each child a plate to tap the edges onto as soon as they were beginning to burn. The cold plate seemed to stop the embers catching fire properly. If any of the paper did begin to burn they could drop it straight onto the plate and not burn their fingers.

The labels had to be small enough to fit onto the bottles. We lost a lot along the way as they caught fire but we soon had a batch made up.

Writing the labels

The final step was to write the potion names on the labels. I did search around online for examples of writing styles and practiced a few first. I wrote out the labels because the writing needed to be small to fit on the labels.

We stuck the finished labels onto their potion bottles and they were done.