Glasses (James Potter)

Prologue

November 17th, 1970

It was about six o'clock in the morning when a small girl jumped out of her bed in a room above a shop in Diagon Alley and raced down the hall to her Uncle's room. 

"Uncle!! It's my birthday. Wake up! Wake up! Wake up!!" She shouted, loud enough to wake the dead in the aforementioned Uncle's opinion.

"Tillie,  I know that you're excited, but it's the crack of dawn. You need your sleep, and I need mine," he said with more self-restraint then he had thought he had (he wanted to yell "shut up and go back to bed" as he was not a morning person.) 

"But Uncle Garrick, please? I want to get working on making and learning about wands with you! You said I could start to learn when I was ten!! And you said my Hogwarts letter would come today," She pleaded, but she was yawning already, and half ready to fall asleep on her uncle's bed rather than have to move. 

"Tillie..."

"Alright Uncle, I," she yawned, "I might just stay here," and she promptly fell asleep once more.
Garrick knew that his niece was an early riser, but six am on a Tuesday, on the one day a year Ollivander's was closed, no less, seemed ridiculously early. But nothing made him happier than his niece, so he didn't mind, really. 

Three hours later, she woke up again, and after double chocolate-chip waffles for breakfast. Garrick started to help Tillie make her first wand.

It was a long wand, 15 and 1/2 inches, rather flexible, cherrywood, with a unicorn hair core. Excellent for divination and for healing. Tillie was so proud of that wand, she held it up and waved it around a bit, just for fun, when out flowed yellow streams of light. Obviously she knew what that meant, the wand chooses the wizard (or witch), and this wand chose her. This tended to be the case with the first wands made by wandmakers, but still, a momentous occasion for the ten-year-old.

And the day kept getting better - her favourite food for lunch (hard-shell tacos), making two whole other wands in the afternoon, her second-favourite food for dinner (soft-shelled tacos), and cake her Uncle had made (tasted horrible but it's the thought that counts), but one thing put a damper on her and her Uncle's mood. 

Tillie's Hogwarts letter never came.

It was obvious to everyone that she was a witch, not a squib (she had her own wand for Merlin's sake!), but she was never accepted to Hogwarts.  

Durmstrang, however, did not have a set list of students they would accept, so after much tears, it was decided (against the wishes of both Tillie and Garrick, though Garrick had to be strong for his niece) that Tillie was to apply to Durmstrang, the school her mother had graduated from.

A pureblood? Related to two of the absolute best wand-makers in the world? Accepted. Immediately.

That's how Gabrielle Matilda Gregorovitch-Ollivander became a student of Durmstrang.

How she got to Hogwarts?

That's a much longer story.