Potion Master's Cabinet

So I tend to recycle stuff.  Our city offers curbside recycling.  I do not recycle glass jars.  I remove the labels, wash them and store them away.  Because, you never really know when you're going to need at least 50 glass bottles at one time.  One of the classes that was to take place during the school day at Hogwarts was Potions.  And no Potions classroom would be complete without bottles and bottles and more bottles of weird stuff.

Thanks to Tuesday Morning
for providing me with a laugh

I could have bought trendy, empty apothecary bottles at a big box retailer, but I am all about saving money when possible.  And those things are NOT cheap.  I think you would have to be bat $#@t crazy to pay $24.99 for a single jar of crystallized bat droppings. (Thanks LB for making that connection for me.) And these were not all that big- about 6" tall.  So since I made almost all of mine from stuff I had on hand I think I had already saved at least $1,250.00.  Way under budget at this point. And I hadn't even left my house.

I began by gathering my bottles and setting all of them out in my dining room on the buffet.Then I started Googling.  "Jar labels"  no, not vintage enough.  "Apothecary labels"  better.  Hmmm, "Harry Potter Potions Labels"  getting closer.  So many searches, so many files I chose to save to my hard drive.

Click the links below to be taken to some of the wonderful images I found.

Apothecary Labels p1

Apothecary Labels p2

Amazing bottles and labels

Once I finally saved enough labels, I began formatting my pages.  I am a huge fan of Microsoft Publisher so I set up a file to print on 8 1/2 x 11" pages.  I keep a stockpile of labels, so I had full sheet sticker sheets at the ready.  Once I got my files looking exactly the way I wanted, I began printing.  Then I cut the labels out by hand and affixed them to the jars and bottles.  (A little known designer trick to make sure your surfaces are REALLY clean is to wipe them down with rubbing alcohol before you stick anything to the surface.)

Big jars got big labels.  Tall jars got tall labels.  Round jars got circular labels.  Some miniature jars did not get labels at all, but tiny cardstock tags I had leftover from another project.  I simply wrote on the tag and tied a string around the neck of the botte and attached the tag.

After attaching the labels, I filled the jars.  I tried to make the contents of the jar match the label- at least as far as a Muggle could create magical ingredients from what was on hand in her cupboards.  I used cooking oil, balsamic vinegar, cat fur, q-tip cotton swabs, and all sorts of other household supplies. I even used miniature LED fairy lights to make one jar glow.

Once all the jars were filled and corked or lidded, I added a few finishing touches to make the bottles look like different "vendors" produced them.  Some jars were wrapped with brown floral tape to seal the corks.  I added twine or hot glue to others to seal the bottles.  I tried making each container unique.  I realize that no one would ever spend as much time studying these as I was, but it was a personal challenge to make the collection as a whole unique and interesting.

 A skull-shaped bottle held Draught of Living Death
(water tinted with red food coloring).  The Skele-Gro is homemade Kahlua.
 Veritaserum is filled with vegetable oil.

Mermaids' Tears (epsom salt) filled a tiny bottle that sat near the front of the potions cabinet. Fur from our cat brush was carefully tucked inside the jar labeled Werewolf Fur.   I even found a few cicada shells that I collected (my mom had more success than I did, she added nearly 90 shed shells to my jar.)

The shed cicada shells filled an apothecary jar from the Target Dollar Spot (one of the few containers I actually purchased.  It was counted and sealed by the Department for the Regulation and Control of Magical Creatures.  The label used  for this jar is from Avery. Party goers were encouraged to guess the number of shells in the jar.  The winner took home a handmade copy of the Monster Book of Monsters.

Bottles, a lone skull beer stein, bones, and books fill the completed Potion Master's  cabinet

This antique Welsh cupboard usually resides in our Dining Room and is filled with my collection of brown transferware.  For the party, it was emptied and moved into the garage which was draped in countless yards of black fabric to create a Potions classroom.

I ended up with a "few" extra bottles.  So they were placed on a borrowed bookshelf
 in Diagon Alley (formerly known as our Entry Hallway.)

As I made dinner that night, I realized all my balsamic vinegar had been decanted and moved into the Potion Master's cabinet.  I had to go fetch it and use it for a crockpot recipe.  Shhhh.  I never told my kiddos that Squid Ink was my secret ingredient.  Dinner never tasted so good!

To access one set of my curated apothecary labels here. You can dowload and print them and make your own potions bottles.

The next project to tackle- wands.