Nerd Alert: A Harry Potter T-Shirt

My sister Bekah has made brief appearances on my blog before, and like it or not, you're going to get to know her a little better today. #1 fact to know about Bekah? HUGE Harry Potter nerd. Seriously. Huge. I love me some Harry Potter, too, but this girl puts me and my fandom to shame. If I'm not mistaken, she's re-read all the books in the series every summer since they first came out. It wouldn't surprise me much if they are the only books she has ever read.

More proof of her tremendous nerdiness:

1) The other day, she met a guy who said he worked in smelting. Like any hardcore HP fan, she immediately said, "Poke him with your Smelting stick, Dudley!", an obscure reference to the 1st book. When he was confused, she began acting out, in painstaking detail, the entire scene, until she realized she looked like a crazy person and sidled awkwardly out of the room.

2) When she came to my house the other day and saw a piece of dowel left over from a project I'll be showing you soon, she picked it up and said, "Is this your wand?", then pointed it at me and shouted, "Expelliarmus!" Thank goodness she went with a harmless spell.

3) I once called her at 11 at night because it was driving me crazy that I couldn't remember the name of the tub-thingy that Dumbledore used to store memories in (think fast! Do you know what it's called?). Over the phone, I said, "Bekah, what's that thing in Dumbledore's office--" and she said, "The pensieve." Just like that. She knew what it was. I hadn't described it yet. Unbelievable!

So I shouldn't have been surprised when she called me yesterday morning in a tizzy because she didn't have a Harry Potter t-shirt to wear on this most important of days. We brainstormed a bit . . . my favorite idea was a t-shirt that would say, "I solemnly swear that I'm up to no good," on the front, and "Mischief managed" on the back (a tribute to the Marauder's Map, of course), and she wanted to recreate this Harry Potter pillow on a t-shirt (too much work).

So we settled for something a little more subtle out of necessity (the necessity being we only had about an hour, and I didn't have many supplies on hand):

Just a simple tribute to the boy who lived, made with a cardstock stencil (not the smartest idea, for the record, but I couldn't find my freezer paper) and acrylic paint mixed with fabric medium. I was going to protect the poor girl from internet scorn by cropping her wand out of the picture, as shown above, but what the hey, I know she's not ashamed of this:

That's my girl. What a dork.

(If I decide I enjoy feedback from strangers more than I enjoy keeping random blog readers from laughing at my family [which I do], I'll link this up to some of these bad boys.)