A MAGIC CHEST

Dear Reader

I've finally got round to loading my pictures of the favours produced for the Business Awasrds. The idea was to produce a 'magic' Harry Potter chest. I wanted to make each chest different for the four different houses represented on the night. I played around with different colour caskets, ribbons, house logos etc and couldn't settle on any one idea. I was on a budget for the boxes as with 500 people costs soon mount so I knew the basic chest had to be cheap and cheerful. I settled on the box below which is really a wedding favour 'coffret' and sent for samples in different colours. How to close it? I came up with the idea of sealing wax as being very Harry Potter and bought a small seal and red wax from The Range to try the idea out. It worked! I then thought about the contents. Hmmmmm. I wanted something magical and after ringing round several companies someone told me about a 'magic' wand they stocked. Perfect! I thought what spells are commonly used and I thought frogs. And then chocolate frogs! But realistic (well sort of - definitely not cutesy ones). These were sourced but were surprisingly expensive. Then we needed some kind of spell in the box - an incantation telling people what to do. At that point I realised that I was not going to have time to make 500 individual bespoke boxes and called in a very talented lady called Katie Carter from the Neatly Coloured Card Company. She took to the ideas straightaway (I think a Harry Potter fan) went away with a brief and all the elements for the casket and below is the amalgamation of my ideas and her clever crafting.

Here is the casket presented to the guests. You can see Katy has distressed the basic black casket (we settled on one uniform colour - black - for all the caskets but changed the colours with the embroidery thread, house label (she produced these tiny labels beautifully) and seal colour. This casket was mine and I was sat at a Humberpuff House table - and so it is in the colours of Humberpuff which were yellow and black. You can just make out the house mascot. In each case it was an animal and in Humberpuff's case this was a badger. The other houses were Scunnerin (green and silver - animal snake), Grimmydoor (scarlet and gold - animal lion) and Ravenscorus (blue and bronze - animal eagle).

Once the casket was opened the first thing you saw was a rolled up parchment. Here it is unrolled. This is what it said:

Expand your wand and concentrate very hard on the image of your heart's desire. Aim your wand at your treasure chest and close your eyes. Be sure your aim is true. Repeat the incantation "Transformus Enterprisus Magicus" Open your eyes to a potentially brighter future. Now look deeper into the chest. Has the magic worked?"

And under a layer of shredded green tissue the guests found the item below in their chests

Once the tiny rubber ring was removed the magic wand magically appeared like so. The sound of 500 people's magic wands all opening up at once and the exclamations of surprise were really great!

After you tried the spell you looked under more green tissue to see if your heart's desire would be revealed. 499 guests found the frog. Better luck next time! But one lucky guest found a miniature Prince Charming in their chest. Unfortunately, best laid plans and all that - and believe me we really did try and fix it so that a woman would open the chest - but unfortunately the Prince was found by a man!!!! Ah well........ the idea was a good one!

I thought I would post this to remind myself in times to come but also I thought my crafty friends might appreciate a look.