My son absolutely loves the “Itsy Bitsy Spider” song, though his hand motions for the entire thing are simply holding his hands above his head and opening and closing them 🙂 So of course I knew he needed to have a spider page, and what luck that there is a magnificent spider in residence on the Hogwarts grounds! The design of this page came almost exactly from the spider page here on Dani Fressato’s blog. I loved the idea of making different web designs by wrapping around the various buttons.

I used 4 pieces of thin elastic to make the foundations of the web and then sewed a total of 16 buttons along the elastic. The spider was made using left over fleece from my large stuffed Toothless Dragon (picture included below because I love him SO! P.S. if anyone wants to make one of their own, this is the free pattern/ tutorial by Nooby-banana which is really well done! ). I had a few small safety eyes left and used the ivory colored yarn that would be his silk to secure four black pipe cleaners together inside for the legs before everything was sewn together. Then the other end of his silk was poked through to the back of the page and sewn down. Our spider friend has a snap on his back with which he can be mounted to the middle of his web!

What would Harry’s Hogwarts experience be without potions class? My son’s potions page has four removable felt bottles, each one unique, and two shelves. The bottom shelf stores the bottles and the top shelf has identical outlines that the bottles can be matched with.

The only regret I have with this page is that I had more of the hook sides of the velcro dots than the soft fluffy bits, and instead of breaking out the roll of velcro and cutting what I needed, I decided to use the excess hook-y dots for the 8 pieces needed for the page, and use the fluffy dots for the back of the potions bottles. I was super proud of myself until I realized that the hook-y dots now catch on the mirroring page when the book is closed and will wear down and fuzzy-up the felt quicker than it would have. But darn it I am not going back to change them out so I will just have to breath through it and know that it’s all going to be destroyed by my son eventually anyway 😉

On to the next pages!!