If you’re looking for DIY Harry Potter party favors, you’ve come to the write, ahem, right place. I love making party favors almost as much as I love planning parties. This goes a long way toward explaining why the guests at our daughter’s Harry Potter birthday party left with an overflowing goodie bag. In addition to the wands that they received as a reward for completing the escape room challenge, our guest witches and wizards scored a Gryffindor notebook and a quill pen. Although making beautiful party favors that I know my guests will enjoy is always my main goal, I get really excited when I can make them quickly and easily so that I can move on to the next DIY project on my to-do list. This DIY quill pen checks both boxes.

Materials

• 30 x 4 mm brass straight long tube spacer beads
• 5 mm brass square beads
• Bic Round Stic Grip Xtra Comfort (or any ballpoint pen with a removable shell)
• gold ostrich feathers
• hot glue gun

One Bead at a Time

The first step is to pry apart the shell of the ballpoint pen. If you have the Bic Round Stic pens, the easiest way to remove the shell is to hold the comfort-grip in one hand while using the thumb of the opposite hand to push the plastic just above the comfort grip up. Once you have removed this piece, you will be able to slide the comfort grip off, leaving just the ink cartridge. Take a minute or two to celebrate.

Now it’s time to get down to business! Slide one of the brass tube beads onto the ink cartridge, stopping about a half-inch before the end. Apply a small dot of hot glue just below the tube and slide the tube down to the end of the shaft. The smaller the dot of glue, the better because we don’t want the glue to ooze out of the bead. Next, slide a square bead onto the cartridge, but stop short of the tube bead to leave space for the hot glue. Apply glue to the cartridge, and slide the square bead into place. Repeat these two steps twice.

A Quill Pen for Muggles

You should now have three tubes and three square beads on your ink cartridge. Stack a second square bead above your last bead. Because we don’t want the ink cartridge to be visible once we’ve added the last bead, we have to trim the ink cartridge such that it stops just below where the top of the third bead will be. Basically, the idea is to leave enough of the cartridge to hold the final bead in place while eliminating the portion that extends beyond the bead. To accomplish this goal, I had to trim a quarter of an inch off of my cartridge, but you might have to remove a little more or less depending on the length of your ink cartridge. Glue the final bead in place.

The final step is to attach the feather. Trim the feather and leave approximately a quarter of an inch of the stem extending below the feathers. Fill the hole of the top bead with glue and insert the feather. One note of caution here: don’t push the feather into the cartridge too far. The sweet spot is just below the bottom of the last bead. If you go beyond this point, you run the risk of causing the ink cartridge to overflow. Trust me, you don’t want that!

And that’s all there is to making a quill pen for muggles! The way I see it, you have two options. You can either relax with a cocktail or a glass of wine, or you can move on to the next project. I know which way I’m voting!