The Golden Snitch! Ornament Tutorial

Yup, I wore a hastily made clip-on felt Gryffindor tie to the premier of Harry Potter this year. This officially makes me a crafty dork, but it also means I had an uncontrollable urge to try making a Golden Snitch ornament for my tree. They turned out really nicely and I thought there might be one or two other crafty Potter fans out there who would like to know how to make one too.

First, draw an actual size sketch of how you want your snitch wings to look on a scrap piece of paper. Use this as a guide to shape thin craft wire into your wing shape. Close the shape by twisting the wire around the other one 3 or 4 times to make a tight coil. Snip the wire close to the coil. Make 2 (I made 4 as I am giving another Snitch away to my lovely sister).

Coat wires with glue and lay a sheet of tissue paper over top of wires. Use a clean dry brush to push down on the paper, sticking it down to the wires all around each wing. Let dry, then cut out, leaving a few millimeters of paper as a border. Apply glue to border and roll over edges of wire all around the wing. Coat wings on each side with white glue and apply light gold glitter. Let dry.

I used a mixture of brown and gold acrylic paint to paint the swirly 'snitchy' markings on the golden ornaments. I did this mostly from memory and they don't look like movie replicas, but I am okay with that. It occurred to me that if you had a fine-point brown sharpie and one of those gold paint pens, you might be able to achieve real greatness here. I chose to use glass ornaments, because I had them already, although plastic might prove easier to attach the wings to.

Use a small dab of hot glue on the wire coils to make a surface for attaching to the ball. I held each of them vertically against a piece of parchment paper. They don't stick to the parchment (or the glass balls, I tried this first), so just hold each one until the glue cools and a flat surface has formed on the bottom.

I tried a bunch of glues to get the wings to stick to the glass balls. Hot glue pops right off, white glue takes too long to set, even Super Glue didn't work. Finally I tried my trusty Fabri-tac, a glue which I only recently discovered (that I cannot live without), which is like a very strong type of rubber cement, and success! Hold each wing until the glue sets (about a minute or so), then cover glue with gold paint. Tadaa! Go hang it on your tree and get yourself a cookie, you deserve it :)