excitedFor a Potter movie, the best pastime is, of course, Quidditch. (The best active pastime. The best passive pastime might be writing round-robin crackfic. HP crackfic has ruined me for serious fic forever. The discerning X-Phile might be able to trace this fondness of mine back to "Colors".) For a good, rousing game of informal in-line ground-based Quidditch, you pretty much need balls that won't really hurt anyone if thrown, and bats to whack them with. A variety of balls, of course. Enthusiastic players. Yay, Quidditch.
I stopped by the dollar store. I am now the proud owner of one (1) pale yellow foam pool noodle, one (1) honeydew-sized blue inflated ball with pufferfish-style nubs on the outside, and one (1) squishy purple-and-green stressball. The foam pool noodle was cut down to form three (3) bats about two feet in length each.
I'm going to either make some up-too-late Potterheads very happy, or some Mall Security very unhappy. (Or both.) I deliberately went for the soft-and-squishy, as it's exceptionally non-dangerous, unless someone's choking on it.
I hit the fabric store and emerged with one spool each of blue and gold ribbon, and a black cord frog to replace the broken pewter clasp on the wonderful cape that Mama made for me so many years ago. The frog looks lovely with the cloak. It's a little more complicated than the usual few swirls of cord, a loop, and a knot: this one has spirals of cord facing each other across each side of the closing and across the edges of the cloak, and a lovely loopy decorative knot at each end besides the knot of the closing. I'll take and post photos at some point, though I may be a little hyper to make coherent photo posts now.
The ribbons are winding up in my hair. I have a number of slender and neutral (black, browns, navy blue) headbands, and I grabbed the black one and knotted the gold and blue ribbons about it, so they'll fall through my hair and down my back, flashing Ravenclaw colors without being so bulky as a scarf, as flashy as a tie, or as hard to re-arrange as an actual clever hairstyle laced with colored ribbons. They'll hold for Quidditch, in other words.
I'm going to try and get there early so I can drop off a book at the library and get a good place in line or something like that.
