On a Friday afternoon in late October, the Willie Janssen Discovery Room at the Grande Prairie Public Library will smell faintly of craft glue and look, if all goes well, like the back shelf of an apothecary. The library's Potion Making program runs from 2 to 3 p.m. on October 23, 2026, and the premise is exactly what it sounds like: participants brew their own potions, personalize them, and take the bottles home. The ingredients list is short and cheerful — glitter and mica powder — and the program is free.
The library files the session under Arts & Crafts and lists it for teens, which puts it in the company of the branch's other after-school and weekend offerings rather than its storytimes. It is a drop-in style of program in spirit: show up, get a bottle, choose a colour, decide what your potion does. There is no wrong answer, which is rather the point.
The materials are more interesting than they first appear. Mica powder is a mineral pigment ground fine enough to behave like a liquid metal in suspension; it is the same family of pigment that gives eyeshadow its pearl and resin jewellery its depth. Swirled into a bottle with water, oil or gel, it does not simply tint the liquid — it catches light and seems to glow from inside, drifting and settling in slow ribbons. Glitter does the cruder, more reliable version of the same trick. Put the two together and a plain glass bottle becomes something that looks, at a glance, like it might actually do something.
That is the small magic of the format. Potion-making as a craft has boomed alongside the fantasy shelf, and libraries have noticed. A bottle of shimmering liquid is a low-cost, high-satisfaction project: it takes minutes, it rewards colour mixing and layering, and it produces an object worth keeping. It also sneaks in a little science — density, suspension, why some powders float and others sink — without anyone having to call it science.
There is a fitting symmetry in the setting. The room where the brewing happens is named for Willie Janssen, a self-educated rancher from the Peace River area who used the Grande Prairie library quietly for years. As CBC News reported, Janssen donated more than $200,000 to the library anonymously during his lifetime, a fact that only became known after his death in 2010, when he also left the library a bequest totalling almost $1 million. Then-director Maureen Curry told the CBC that Janssen was "just a regular library user that most people didn't really even remember terribly well because he wanted to remain so strictly quiet and private." The Discovery Room was named in his honour five and a half years after his death, with the library noting that his wishes were for everyone to have the opportunity to learn, discover and be creative. A room built on a hidden gift is a reasonable place to make a potion whose ingredients are a small secret too.
The library itself has deep roots in the city. Today it operates out of the Montrose Cultural Centre at 9839 103 Avenue, in a city that serves as the commercial hub of the Peace Country. The branch has changed with the times in ways Janssen might have enjoyed: it lends toys, runs two 3D printers, offers a Commissioner of Oaths, keeps a Little Free Pantry, and no longer charges late fees.
For anyone planning to attend, the program is listed for teens, and the library asks for registration through its events calendar at events.gppl.ca. The branch is open 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. on Fridays, so the session sits comfortably inside the day. The library has also posted a notice that Alberta's time zone changes are currently causing some programs in November and beyond to display incorrect start and end times on its calendar — worth double-checking the listing closer to the date, though October 23 itself is listed as 2 to 3 p.m.
What the hour actually yields is a bottle of something that glitters, a name for it, and a story about what it does. In a city where the biggest roadside landmark is a 12-metre sundial, there is something appealing about an afternoon devoted to a much smaller object that also exists mainly to catch the light.