The End.

Writing The End.  As the title fo this post reminded me of the Series of Unfortuant events.  The last book is entitled The End, or I think it is.  Havne't read it for a while now.  Anyway, our last class, we very productively cleaned up the entire room.  You can now see both the desk and the floors and the Hogwarts castle, alas has been torn down brick by brick and now resides in pieces, each in its properly labeled bin.  We ended up sorting a lot of the LEGOs from the miscellaneous bin and now the bins of sorted LEGOs are practically overflowing.
Then to celebrate the ending of class, we made ice cream, but because our teacher is also a physics professor, we made ice cream with liquid nitrogen.  Definently cool.

Well, its been fun, but here is where my blog ends.

Performance Time: Welcome to Hoggy Warty Hogwarts!

    The exhibition was exciting.  The good part was a lot fo people loved our project, the bad part was that we unfortunantly were unable to see any of the other projects, because we were so busy with the Hogwarts Castle.  It was neat how our castle captured the interest of everyone.  The little kids, who couldn't quite understand the Room of Requirement or Fluffy's room, were amazed by the fire changing colors when spoken to.  Then there was the Voldemort versus Harry battle game that had people anxious to try and beat.  One kid came back to battle three times!  This battle had both older kids and adults entertained and it made Karishma and I happy to see that other people were having fun with the castle we had created.  The funny thing about the room of requirement though, was that your hand needed to be slender enough to get into the door and grab the Potions book.  Some adult hands and some teenagers for that matter were just able to fit through, making that task more of a challenge for them than for other people.

    The thing we would perhaps take into more account next time when making something like this is that the detail of Harry Potter lore, just may not be as needed.  A few things we needed to explain the reasoning behind the contraption or action that occurred because not eveyone had seen the movies or read the book.  But that wasn't too bad.  For those Harry Potter enthusiast that were there, they were excited about seeing Hogwarts.  One girl was able to name every room, just by looking at them.  That kinda' shocked me, because I didn't think we'd decorated that well, but she did have a hard time with namming the chamber of secrets until we told her that the creature there was a Basilisk.

The hour exhibition went over quickly and we were slightly late packing up, because there was one more kid who wanted to explore the castle before we put it up.  Then taking it down, it only broke into three pieces.  We were kinda' fustrated.  Taking the structure up to sage lounge resulted in it collapsing into easily six or seven pieces and us repairing it two hours before the exhibition.  Oh well.  At least we did repair it.  Here are some clips from the exhibition.

It was exciting and fun and now I'm tired.

The Final Days: Busy, Busy, Busy....

These last few classes and work outside of class has been completed with such expectations.  The castle has turned out really well.  Tommorrow's the big exhibition day.  Looking back, I almost think we may have been too detail centric in our Hogwarts castle.  When it came to choosing between how things are done in the book and the movie, we choose the book, even though more people have seen the movie.  Oh well.  It's sure to get some attention even if its not completly understood.  So here are some last final pictures and if I remember, I get some video footage of the Hogwarts castle in action tommorrow.  Thursday is the sad day, when the castle must be dismembered.

Potions Books, can anyone say "Half Blood Prince."  These will be found in the
Room of Requirement and one of the tasks is to retrive a book before the door closes.

Harry Potter of course!

Voldemort boo, hisss.

Banners to decorate the great hall.  Each of the Four Houses,
Hufflepuff, Slytherin...

Gryffindor and Ravenclaw.

We wanted to include the Hogwarts school crest in here somewhere.
It always decorates the wall very nicely.

Fluffy really is fluffy.  He doesn't look as ferocious as the one in the movie,
but then the danger always comes from the least expected locations.

Our sensor for opening the door is cleverly hidden by my
partner Karishma's beautifully handmade rug.

We don't have any pictures of the Basilisk which was finished last night, but I will be sure to post pictures of him from tommorrow's exhibition.  Last night we ran into technical dificulties, when we put on the Basilisk's head and realized he now couldn't fit through the doorway.  So that is also one reason why we don't have pictures of him.  He wasn't completly decorated until last night.