Harry Potter & Afternoon Tea with Zoella and Sprinkle of Glitter

Out of 15000 entrants - so Louise said - I was fortunate enough to win tickets to an exclusive event. This consisted of free entry into the Harry Potter Studio Tour, afternoon tea with Zoe and Louise and then a screening of the Deathly Hallows Part 2 in the cinema at the studio. I am a huge Potterhead and an avid YouTube watcher so this was the perfect prize! I had an absolutely wonderful day; I'm extremely thankful to Warner Bros for running this competition and Zoe and Louise for being so lovely. This blog post will contain many photos from throughout the day and also the story of when I met the ladies, who are two of my blogging inspirations!

We got to the studio quite early (over an hour before our allotted registration time) so had a mooch around the gift shop. I felt like I was in heaven and wanted to buy everything - but restrained and came out having purchased nothing! But that didn't stop me from taking pictures of some of the things that caught my eye.

The walls of the gift shop were decorated in all sorts of framed posters like this, but this was my favourite. I loved it so much I took a wonky photo of it!

I have had one of these before and it is a solid chocolate frog. Heaven.

This is my favourite photo of the day - I'm very happy with the way that it came out. Wandering around Honeydukes and seeing the assortment of wizarding sweets was so interesting and also made my mouth water.

We then went and registered and had to stand in lots of queues before we finally entered the studio tour!After watching a few short films about the series, we entered the Great Hall. I was gobsmacked, it looks exactly like in the films (obviously, because it's the set but it was still amazing to see that it was actually real!) The tour guide in there was really enthusiastic about everything and used a lot of crowd participation which really heightened the experience for me; I heard people later saying they had come here before and had a guide that sounded bored and for that reason they hadn't enjoyed it as much.

The most majestic fireplace ever made!

I definitely want one of these for my house.

The Gryffindor Lion. 

After the Great Hall we were left to roam the rest of the tour ourselves. I absolutely loved wandering around all the sets, it was well and truly magical (pun intended.) I took so many photos, but as I only have the use of one arm - the other is in a sling! - I found it quite hard to hold the camera still long enough to focus etc so a fair amount of them came out blurry. However, I still got some good ones:

Ice? Glass? Plastic? No clue what it is but it's SO beautiful.
It's featured in the Yule Ball, in the Goblet of Fire.

Try and tell me this doesn't look like real chocolate?!

The Fat Lady!

I sometimes like to get all arty...

We then made our way outside to the Backlot. This is where we had to be to meet the rest of our group for the afternoon tea, but there was still Harry Potter stuff out there to explore! We queued for both the Knight Bus and Hogwarts Bridge to get photos on those.

I really wish we could have gone inside this - it looked so cool!

We still had half an hour or so to go before our meeting time, so we went to get Butterbeer! (A mistake as we were later given some for free, but delicious all the same.) I had tried Butterbeer before and loved it, but it was my friends first time. She didn't like it - so I got the rest!

This was before we tried it, so she wasn't this happy for very long!

Now onto my favourite part of the day! We queued for a lot longer than we expected because the first group were in there there longer, this meant we were all getting quite apprehensive. We weren't sure what to expect because we only had half an hour for 50 of us, which isn't very long at all for a decent chat with Zoe & Louise. When Zoe had spoken about the competition in her vlog she made it seem like we would have a long time with her so we were all very confused. Finally, all of the other group came out and we were lead through! 

I could not have been happier with the result of the day. We were lead into a room that had a selection of foods, from sandwiches to cupcakes and scones, but I was too excited to take a photo of that! I had a gorgeous cupcake with strawberry icing and I picked it up as soon as I walked into the room. There was mirrors everywhere and some cool cube seats, so the whole environment was very relaxed. I immediately made my way over to Louise because she was the one I was most excited to see. Louise and I have been messaging on Tumblr for a while so she knew who I was (ish) and I was eager to meet her. We discussed bra's (she had quite a revealing dress on!), TFIOS, John and Hank Green and much more. Turns out the people that we fangirl over are also huge fangirls themselves! Louise treated us all like friends and whilst we queued for pictures and then took pictures she chatted away to us. She is so bubbly and happy, exactly like she is in her videos! I took some pictures with Louise on my camera, but I don't like any of them! Thankfully at the time Louise offered to take some pictures on my phone too and I'm very happy with those; she's so silly and fun! 

I can't pick a favourite so I had to put them all here!

We then left Louise and got into the queue for Zoe. Now Zoe has more subscribers so there were more people queueing for her initially and we stood around for a while. Eventually we got to Zoe and she was so lovely! She filmed a video message for my friend (Zoe had recently posted an edit of hers onto Twitter and she means a lot to me so I thought it would be a cool thing to do!) and then we took a picture. We didn't talk with her very much but the small conversation we had was funny and her laugh is infectious!

We got ushered out of the room and told to continue the tour. I couldn't concentrate because I was still overly happy from what had just happened and we were running late for the next meeting so we rushed through all the next bit - Diagon Alley and Hogwarts! I really regret not taking all of this in and definitely want to go back just so I can see this bit again.

They had cornered off a section of the lobby for us and we all just sat around for an hour not really knowing what was going on, but it was nice to mingle with other fans! They brought us bowls of food: 'bangers' and mash, fish & chips, risotto and Caesar salad were our options. I ate a lot of the bangers and mash and I don't regret it at all. It was covered in this gorgeous gravy and it was delicious! 

After a while we entered the room where a short film had been shown earlier and we stood chatting to more of the  people that worked there. She was also very lovely and enthusiastic and I really enjoyed the small Harry Potter talk we had with her! They took us through into the Great Hall again and of course everyone rushed to Zoe and Louise. A circle was formed with them in the middle and neither of them looked very comfortable and I knew after some recent videos this was what they didn't want to happen at a meet up so I removed myself and went and grabbed some popcorn, ice cream and sweets (shoutout to Warner Bros for all the free food!) for the film. I bumped into their manager, Dom Smales, and had a lovely chat and a photo with him - he loved the fact that loads of people wanted photos with him and found it hilarious! After more chatting with the workers of the Harry Potter studios, and a small thank you speech from Zoe and Louise we were sent into the cinema!

Because I hadn't been in the massive crowd, I was quick to get good seats for the film. We sat on the second row and Louise & Zoe were right in front! The film was absolutely brilliant, of course, and we all had a couple of giggles - including some weird noises from Louise; she says it was her drink but I'm not so sure! 

After the film had finished, I quickly tapped Zoe and asked her for another picture because I really didn't like our one from earlier. Of course she said yes and we took it from either side of our seats - awkward but it worked!

Everything looks better in black and white.

They did another thank you speech and then we thanked them - everyone was so polite! And then the day came to an end. I had an absolutely fantastic time and I'm so grateful to everyone involved. I met so many lovely people and experienced one of the best days of my life. Thank you so much if you were there and made this day fabulous and thank you if you've managed to read all the way to the bottom of this! 

Sorry it was so long and there were so many photos, I just didn't want to leave anything out!

Hope you enjoyed reading!

Love,

Sophie x