Your best option within maya is to make the wand cylinder live and draw a cv curve path on it and then use this curve to extrude either a nurbs cirle or a polygon face along.

The curve itself has NO thickness and does not render it is only used to extrude aomething along. If you want a taper you'll have to use a poly surface as there is no option to taper a nurbs circle as I recall.

Maya is borked for me at the moment so I cannot verify or record a video for you. Maybe someone else can make a quick video of the process.

You can then take this into mudbox or zbrush or scultris (free) and refine it to add the bumps and finer details.