As we absolutely love to get involved in the community, taking part in the Bradley Stoke Town Council ‘Famous Witches and Wizards’ scarecrow trail was inevitable.
The scarecrow trail took place during the October half-term (Saturday 24th – Saturday 31st October) to give school children something fun and safe to do in amidst of all this uncertainty. There were 27 scarecrows to find dotted all around Bradley Stoke, all of which were famous witches and wizards from Harry Potter. We were given the ‘Dark Lord’, otherwise known as ‘he who must not be named’.
Before we could appear on the trail, we needed a scarecrow, so Alicia, Emily-Jayne, Gill, Natasha, and Nicole came to the office on Saturday 17th October to get creative. To start, they built the ‘Dark Lord’ using bin bags and old duvets and pillows as padding. He soon started to take shape and they added a life-like mask, skeleton hands and an elder wand made from paper mache to complete the look.
For the ladies, creating a scarecrow was not enough. They went above and beyond to make realistic, factually correct props to add to the presentation. They made a pair of dementors from hamster exercise balls and draped black fabric, tombstones representing the people the Dark Lord had killed from an old bed frame and covered the wooden Christmas deer they use as a decoration in white solar lights to create Harry Patronus. They also got hold of an inflatable snake to represent Nagini and carved pumpkins to add a Halloween touch.
Instead of having a traditional scarecrow in the ground for visitors to see, the ladies spoke to their local connections and got both the scarecrow and the dementors placed in the large oak tree in front of the offices. This, along with the green solar lights that were wrapped around the tree really took the creation to another level.
As you can tell we had a lot of fun creating this. The visitors we spoke to loved it and we hope that everyone else really enjoyed coming to visit. We know the trail was a big success and we look forward to joining in again next year.
