Iowa State Fair has jumped firmly on the JK Rowling bandwagon in the run-up to this week's release of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by announcing an audacious butter sculpture of the boy wizard, the Des Moines Register reports.

Sculptor Sarah Pratt, who apparently took the helm as the fair's lead butter sculptress last year "after more than a decade as Norma 'Duffy' Lyon's apprentice", will hew a likeness of Potter destined for "a place of honour next to the cow inside the Agriculture Building's refrigerated glass case".

Special education teacher Pratt, 30, explained: "The marketing department at the fair and I were looking for something that would be a timely pop-culture thing to do, and with the new movie and new book coming out, it seemed appropriate."

In case you think that knocking out a Harry Potter butter sculpture is just a matter of whipping out a knife and a few thousand packs of Kerrygold, think again. Pratt intends to have the lad astride his Quidditch broom, which presents a few technical challenges.

She admitted: "To try to balance it in some sort of way is the challenging part. I won't really know the weight of butter or how to balance it or get the frame just right to get the look of flying." ®

Bootnote

We were going to add something disparaging about the hype surrounding the launch of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, but decided it was the about the only event big enough to kill the ongoing iPhone frenzy. For the record, we read an online spoiler yesterday which claims the book will see Hogwarts acquired by Microsoft and Potter chained to a desk tasked with debugging Vista. We shall see.

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