DIY Harry Potter Marauder’s Map Christmas Tree Skirt Tutorial

If you make your own Harry Potter inspired Marauder’s Map Christmas tree skirt share a photo with us!

Every year for the holidays our family has a different theme for decorations, gifts – the whole ordeal! This year our theme is Harry Potter (last year was Minecraft) so I have been scouring high and low for ideas and props for our Harry Potter Holidays!

The key to my success? Start early, aim CHEAP, and browse thrift stores with your theme on the mind! I can hardly wait to share with you the final result! I normally don’t use a Christmas tree skirt (heck I’m lucky if we just get the tree up!) but I saw this awesome Marauder’s Map tree skirt idea on Pinterest and saw how simple it was to do!

Even if you’re not artsy – if you can draw simple circle and square shapes that’s enough to get you going! All you need is a white sheet or large piece of white fabric, some tea, and a brown Tulip Fabric Marker!

I started by taking a large white sheet of fabric I picked up at the thrift store for $.50 and then let it sit in a hot pot of black tea for about 30 minutes to stain it an off white color.

I haven’t tried it yet but you could totally “brush” on extra tea stain so that you have more patterns and “smudges” on your tree skirt to look like an old map parchment. But I’m simple remember? I just stained the whole thing and it got the job done!

After I pulled the fabric out of the hot water I rinsed it off and threw it in the dryer to heat set it a bit. Although honestly if I had found a beige sheet I probably would have just bought that and skipped the whole tea thing since my skirt is all one color! Depends how fancy and realistic you want to get!

After cutting the fabric into a large oval/circle shape (I have a ginormous fluffy tree so most of this “map” will be covered anyway!) I decided to draw the hardest part of the map – the Hogwarts crest!

Now, if you need it REALLY simple just skip drawing the animals you see in my crest and just draw lines and dots for each quarter of the crest.

Begin by drawing the outside main shape like I did – a “V” at the bottom, 2 straight sides up, and then an arch at the top. Next draw the letter “H” and outline it in a bubble like I did. Then draw lines to make the crest in 4 quarters and in each quarter draw diagonal lines, dots, straight lines, and graph lines.

OR if you want to try and get creative and dry the animal shapes do that first then add your lines/dots around them.

After that crest is done most everything else is straight lines and normal shapes!

I based a lot of my pattern off of the one I saw on Pinterest because it was SO simple. I’ve seen a few of these tree skirts floating around and some are so ornate there’s no way I could do them so I like this simple idea!

Feel free to add your own “class” shapes and labels or get some ideas from mine!

Above the crest you can see that I drew a large rectangle for the famous moving staircases. Just draw straight lines to mimic the various staircases in different directions.

After I had gone around the entire tree skirt map I decided to add some footprints just like in the movie! I’m not going to lie – the footprints took me the longest time to do! While I was doing them – if you look close – they are all lopsided and different and weird shaped.

But when you stand back you can immediately spot they are footprints and the sizes and shapes weren’t as big of a deal – just do your best! One foot in front of the other!

I also wrote a name of a character from the movie next to each line of footprints.

Dumbledore’s Office was just a never ending circle line that I made look like a staircase (or seashell!).

Here’s my entire map laid out! You can see I didn’t even bother cutting it in a perfect circle – I just wanted a really large base skirt to stick out under the tree! Once I get it under the tree at Christmas I may round it out a little – who knows! (and if you look closely I accidentally listed TWO “Charms” classes – oops!)

Thankfully my kids LOVE LOVE LOVE this kind of stuff and could care less if I spent hundreds of dollars on it or if I made it myself for $.50! You can see many of the ideas and FREE Harry Potter printables I’m working on on our DIY Harry Potter Pinterest board here!

My other Harry Potter DIY tutorials will be coming soon so keep an eye out! I picked up some dirt cheap Harry Potter pillow covers ($3-$5) to cover some old square pillows I had for my kids Christmas gifts!

I even bought reasonably priced Harry Potter bedsheets! Harry Potter wands and generic Gryffindor scarfs are cheapest on eBay runnings about $5-$6 for nice wands with design boxes and under $4 for the scarf!

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