Making Mandrake Roots

I'm sharing part of a booth at the Harry Potter Fest at the end of October this year.  And one of the items I want to make is soft sculpture Mandrake Roots, straight from the Potter movies.  WAY way back years ago when I would have a dealers table at the local science fiction conventions some of the items I'd made were dolls with soft sculptured faces. This was after the Cabbage Patch Kids dolls came out.  Shaping certain fabrics  over soft stuffed insides was pretty easy but I sort of dropped most of that once my dragons started being big sellers.

Looking over what's been done by others on Pinterest and such with 'Mandrake' I was pretty sure that I could easily come up with something, and actually yes, it was a very easy project to do.  A stop at the Dollar Store for silk plants (3 sets of leaves at $1 a set.  I wanted green leaves but this is fall and they only had the browns and oranges) and at JoAnn Fabrics for the gold panne velour (one yard on sale for $3.99) and some yarn ($4.89) for the root tendrils, and that was it. I had black beads for eyes here at home already.

The yarn was Red Heart Scrubby, just one skein.  I got the earth toned one - Almond - which was a mottled cream and dark tan brown variation and the yarn was nubbly enough to be a great texture.  Making 16 Mandrakes (each about 11" tall) used up less than half a skein, and maybe only 1/2 yard of the fabric.  I roughly looped the yarn 3 times around my hand, cut through what dangled and tied a knot in the center for each 'hand' and the 'feet' tendrils.  Varying the length of the loops got me some varied lengths. I did maybe 5 loops for the feet, they looked better being thicker.

The body was free form cut, vaguely in the shape of a yam about 11 inches tall.  Wide-ish at the top, narrowed down to the feet.  I left the opening at the top and sewed the hands and feet in as I went, then turned it right side out, stuffed with fiberfill, inserted silk leaves at the top and closed it up.  Then came the simple needle sculpting to define the legs, add arms by pinching and sewing through, doing frown lines and added the black bead eyes underneath.  They turned out pretty good.