I hope everybody on here is enjoying the remainder of the holiday season and that you're all gearing up for an exciting New Year! That being said, I wanted to share something with all of you that I'm pretty excited about as well - my latest version of Wormtail's wand (forgive the poor quality of some of the pictures - I need to invest in a better camera!). This particular wand has been a long time in the making, and I definitely have to give credit to HeirofOlivander for sharing some really great reference pictures!
As has been pointed out in earlier posts on this site, Wormtail's wand is actually based on a snake whose head curls back onto a wavy, zig-zagged body. I originally wasn't particularly fond of this wand's design just because it's a little unimaginative; it's like there was no effort to take snakelike elements and somehow create a wand from them, instead the wand is just a plain (though somewhat stylized) snake and nothing more. However, there's just something about the warped shape of the wand that grew on me throughout the process of carving it.
This wand represents my first attempt at carving ebony, and compared to the usual domestic woods I'm used to, this was like carving stone. In fact, my normal carving knives were essentially useless for everything but the fine details just because they kept getting dull against the hard ebony. So I had to use a combination of power tools for forming the majority of this wand. In the end, though, I think all the hard work and blisters were well worth it because the ebony gives this wand a great weight and I love the fact that I didn't have to use any stain on it at all. In addition, once I sanded everything and got it as smooth as I could, I was actually able to polish it to a pretty high sheen using a buffing wheel, which I thought was pretty crazy considering wood can be polished as if it were metal! I'll definitely be using ebony again in the future, but in the meantime, I'm really excited to know what you think about this attempt at Wormtail's wand!
As a final note, I wanted to share something interesting about this wand that I found a few days ago. From what I remember in the books, this wand was specifically made for Wormtail by Mr. Ollivander during his emprisonment at Malfoy Manor. So in essence, this would be Wormtail's second wand, or at least a different one than the wand he would have used as a student at Hogwarts. However, I came across a picture from the filming of The Goblet of Fire (I got this picture from the Harry Potter Page To Screen book) where Wormtail appears to be pointing his own wand at Harry instead of Voldemort's. So the design of this wand has apparently been around for a lot longer than any of us ever would have guessed!
So since The Goblet of Fire movie was made before Book 7 was released, it makes sense that J.K. Rowling must not have shared this wand's history with the film crew ...or she might have just made it up as she went along. Or, it could be that Mr. Ollivander simply carved Wormtail's second wand to resemble his first one. In any case, I just thought it was a strange little detail that fellow wandmakers and collectors might enjoy!
