Knitting with Handspun Yarn – Opera Length Arm-Warmers (in the round)

So. Quite a while back, I learned how to hand-spin using the drop spindle that my wife made me out of a cupboard-door-pull, a bent nail, and a bit of skinny doweling. It works quite well, fyi. There’s a reason you can make these things out of tinker toy. 😉
 
Anyway. One of the fibres I’ve been spinning is corriedale. I went with this partially because it’s the least expensive fibre available at my local fibre-geeks shop, but also because it came in (among many other things) a lovely dark wine/berry colour that happens to be something I can wear.
So I spun a heap of that, all the while wondering what I would make from the stuff once I’d spun all the roving I’d bought. (For reference, I’ve used about 2/3 of the stuff as of now). I mean, yes, I know there are a zillion suggestions up on Ravelry for what to do with a small amount of slightly lumpy single-ply probably-worsted-weight yarn.
I’ve even used some of them.
But, this being me, I’m more likely to just futz around with something until I turn it into something useable (see: my method of cooking, for reference).
 
Right.
So where is this going?
It’s going to my attendance at a clothing swap, just shy of two months ago, where-at I was able to pick up a totally adorable 3/4-sleeve (on me…) funfur coat in, oh hey a lovely dark wine/berry colour. That just happens to match the yarn I’ve been hand-spinning for ages.
 
😀
 
See, I live in a climate where winter is, for the most part, Serious Business. But we do get occasional weird-ass thaws, like the one that’s happening as we speak. The temperature is hovering around freezing (a week ago it was -28C not counting the wind chill, so…) and it’s safe for me to wear my totally adorable funfur coat out and about. BUT! It’s still not bare arms weather, which means: arm-warmers!
 
Yeah, I know. Who’s never made arm-warmers?
But I only just got the hang of making them using circular needles, so I’m feeling rather chuffed about the whole thing. I made myself a pair of elbow-length arm warmers to go with a specific piece of clothing. And they look good! 😀
 

Elbow-length arm-warmers made with berry/wine single-ply handspun corriedale yarn. 😀
Go me! 😀

 
Something I’ve learned, though, is that when knitting with hand-spun (or at least with yarn that I’ve handspun…) there may need to be an extra row here or there to make up for the variations in yarn thickness. My second one is just a tiny bit (maybe 5mm?) shorter than my first one.
Woops.
Still! They do what they’re supposed to do and look like they’re supposed to look, and I managed not to drop any stitches, so I’m happy! 😀
 
If I were to do this pattern again with a similarly weighted (or “gaged”, I suppose) yarn, I would probably make some changes.
But let’s take a look.
 
Original Pattern for Opera-Length Arm-Warmers (for a very tall woman)
 
1) Cast 40 stitches onto a set of 4mm (or so) circular needles sized for making socks and baby-hats and similar.
 
2) Knit back-and-forth two rows
 
3) Knit in-the-round five rows (pattern continues in-the-round unless otherwise specified)
 
4) Knit two, Pearl two, for seven rows
 
5) Reduce (one row of stitches only) using the following stitche pattern: [Knit two, pearl-two-together, pearl one] –> You should now have thirty stitches on your needles
 
6) Knit two, Pearl two, for 14 rows
 
7) Knit (everything) for 50 rows
 
8) Knit back-and-forth (to make the hole for the thumb) for 24 rows
 
9) Knit in-the-round 10 rows
 
10) Cast off, keeping stitches fairly loose
 
~*~
 
If I were to do this pattern again, I would change steps 3, 4, and 5 as follows:
 
3) Knit in-the-round 16-20 rows, depending on how far over your elbow you want the arm-warmers to extend (NOTE: must be an even number of rows or the rest of the pattern won’t look right)
 
4) THERE IS NO FOUR
 
5) Reduce (one row of stitches only) using the following stitche pattern: [Knit one, knit-two-together, pearl two] –> You should now have thirty stitches on your needles
 
~*~
 
So there you have it. 🙂 The original pattern makes a very fitted pair of 16″ arm-warmers that can be worn with or without thin gloves underneath. With the above changes, the arm-warmers will be 17″-18″ in length. If you’re a tall or long-limbed individual, these should run from right around where your palm meets your fingers to just above your elbows. There’s lots of space (in those fifty rows of knited stiches) to modify these for either length (remove – or add! – extra rows) and pattern, for example if you find the knitting-for-ever stuff to be insufficiently challenging, you could add a really spiffy cable pattern along one side to fancy it up a bit. 🙂
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden. 🙂

Zodiacal Musings: A Pathworking

Reblogging in part so that I can find this again, as I’d like to give it a go. 🙂

The Magickal Pen

As we end the year and begin one anew, I would like to share a pathworking of the Zodiac. Each New Year brings  the opportunity to connect more fully with those aspects of your natal chart that offer support to your life’s experience. There is no need to be a professional astrologer or even an advanced student of astrology to begin the process of connection. Simply beginning with an exploration of your natal Sun sign can open your self-awareness to a place of deeper knowledge of the potential of your strengths and bolstering your weaknesses. Let’s begin…. Turn your focus and attention to your breath. Allow the space of  your consciousness to move with the rise and fall of your chest and the filling and release of the lungs. Continue in this manner for several breaths; allowing each to become softer, smoother and slower.  With each breath your physical body appears…

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Z is for Zero to Zenith – Pagan Blog Project 2013

Last post for this round of The Pagan Blog Project.
In my previous post (officially done to complete the 2012 series of prompts… better late than never), I briefly touched on some (very) new additions to my practice.
 
For the most part (possibly the entire part?) my new additions – both the ritual group and the tantric stuff with my wife, plus the course I’m taking with Del – are not solitary practices. This is a bit of a New Thing for me, as I’ve done solitary practice for pretty much the entire time I’ve been IDing as Pagan. (I attended a monthly goddess group for a year and a half, and did a few rituals with friends back in 2002, but that’s about it). But I’ve been feeling like I needed a “buddy” or something for some time, particularly after some of what I picked up on during my (not all that frequent) trips to my personal Inner Landscape and my wife’s admonition of “I don’t want to come home to Crazy Wife” which, while I don’t think I’m likely to head down the madness path because of anything I find in my own head… I can’t actually guarantee that. I want to have some kind of a life-line so that I can be pulled out if need be. :-\
 
So: Buddy System (or group ritual, or guided meditation with something that is not a tape-player doing the guiding, or, or, or) it is. 🙂
 
But why talk about this in a post called “Zero to Zenith”?
Well… Okay. Let’s haul another Z word into this: Zodiac. We’re about to flip into 2014, and my We’Moon horoscopes have been saying “explore sacred sexuality” for a couple of years now. I’ve got no idea if this is My Path, but there are so many corelations and similarities between various bits and pieces of Stuff That I Do, that it seems like I’d be a twit not to take a look and try to get some education and experience in this end of the world.
So, if I’m starting… pretty close to zero in terms of experiences and know-how, while I’m cocky enough to presume I’ll become some kind of an expert or whatever in the space of a year, I’m hoping to get a few steps up that mountain and develope the techniques and skills I’ll need to keep climbing. 🙂
 
Base camp, here we come. O.O
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.

Z is for Zone – Pagan Blog Project 2012

Hehehe. Almost there. Let’s see if I can’t finish 2012 (a year late) along with 2013.
 
When I say “zone”, I mean “in the zone”, and what I’m talking about is “flow”.
I went to a workshop a little over a year ago (so, by the standards of this being a “2012” post, “two and a half months ago”) that talked about “flow arts” – stuff like hooping or poi or flogging or improvisational dance/music or… all sorts of stuff – and how “flow” is the point you hit (that place, to paraphrase Ursula K LeGuin, where “the words cannot be wrong”) that is the balance between skill and challenge.
For me, because I’m fairly low-skill and high-challenge when it comes to hooping, I hit “flow” somewhere just north of keeping the hula hoop moving and not falling down. For someone like Lisa Lottie, flow involves something a lot more complicated, just because her skill level is that much higher.
 
So why am I bringing this up in a Pagan blog post?
 
Because I think that energywork and the kind of “running energy” that one does during extatic dance or ecstatic singing are their own type of “flow”. When you’re In The Zone and the energy is flowing through you, cycling through you, and you can keep going for ever (the gals who wrote Radical Ecstasy talk about the Forever Place, and that’s… related, I think, though maybe not exactly the same thing)… that’s what I think of as “flow”. It’s also a situation where I – and, I assume, lots of other people – have a much easier time directing that energy to where it needs to go, whether that’s throwing sound the length of a city block or two, refueling one’s dancing body, or pouring energy into someone else: To ease their aches and pains, as in massage; or as a way of intuiting(?) where best to hit them next and how hard and with what.
 
Flow has a meaning in ritual, as well. I’m thinking particularly of group rituals where whoever is leading them has to pay attention to the arc and movement of the ritual, but also to the level of focus and ability in the group they’re leading. Which is where “flow” as in “narrative flow” entwines and intersects with “flow” as in “challenge/skill flow”.
It’s why ritual chants that are essentially sung in monotone are (a) a good idea for most open-attendence rituals, and also (b) a bloody piss-off for someone like me who will get seriously bored and disinterested with something that doesn’t have nearly enough notes to make a real tune. (My favourite Goddess Chant is actually the chorus from Hymn to Her. 4/4 time, easy-to-grasp tune & lyrics, but also easy-to-harmonize tune that’s complicated enough to be just-challenging-enough for most folks who don’t want to be improvising harmonies all the time.
 
Flow is, I think, why repetitive tasks (like spinning or knitting or chopping apples) or art forms that rely on improvised combinations of base forms/techniques (various types of dance and song) are so useful for getting into Trance. Getting your body into one Zone helps you shift your brain/mind/spirit into another.
 
I am starting (as in: the past couple of days) to incorporate more ritual into my life, specifically:
 
I tried doing tantric (or possibly “trantric”) breathing with my wife the other day… I got light headed, she got really, really relaxed, but we did not manage to syncronize anything and my chakras stayed well and truely tamped down, much to my dismay. Still, we’re going to try it again.
 
I’ve recently been invited to attend some Reclaiming-esque rituals in my neighbourhood that a sister-femme artist is looking to start running. I’m really happy about this, as I kinda miss “church” and appreciate the opportunity to attend a regular ritual that I don’t have to be in charge of.
 
I’m looking forward to seeing how these new additions to my life/practice play into how (and how easily) I move in and out of trance space; run, manipulate, and transfer energy; and develope my personal Zone.
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.

Winter Solstice 2013

So it’s been a few days since the Sun hit the low/dark point of her annual cycle. We held our usual shindig while the snow piled up outside. Lit a LOT of candles – including a bunch of red ones in our spiffy new-to-us chandalier (a gift from a friend who was moving house). Much shortbread was eaten, much sortilege was drunk, and a good time was had by all.
I now have a fridge so full of fancy food I have to be really careful with the menu planning so that I don’t forget what we’ve got. (It’s too easy to just say “Screw it” and graze on shortbread cookies and sugar-glazed nuts all day).
 
It’s funny. We didn’t decorate nearly as much as we did last year. Part of this is because one of my (plastic) holly garlands is falling apart before my eyes. I’m sure that a few minutes with a glue gun would solve that problem, but I’m wondering if I should just pull it apart and string the leaves on something a little sturdier (like feather-weight aluminum chain or finger-knitted yarn[1], or something).
The other part, quite possibly, is just feeling “tired”. Tired as in “lethargic”. Tired as in “uninspired”.
This time last year, we were still in the process of moving into our new apartment. Our solstice shindig was blended with our wedding reception. This year, it’s been eight months of my poor wife working herself to exhaustion at multiple jobs and me being scattered and distracted and chasing a million different things (although that’s not actually all that unusual for me), which family (of origin) plans have been up in the air until the last possible minute for all of us.
Hoy.
Plus we have more family members than we did last year. Last year, my wife’s other partner spend Xmas even and morning with us, taking part in my family-of-origin’s festivities. This year, she’s in Manhattan (conveniently), but Ghost’s GF/Submissive (they are coming up on their first anniversary, too, fyi) is pretty clearly becoming One Of The Family and that will most likely add extra complications to any planning we do in future.
 
It’s interesting to watch us build our traditions. What elements take center stage, what we bring in from our childhoods and what we create ourselves.
I like giving presents. But it feels like less of a thing this year than it has in years past (maybe that will seesaw for a while, or maybe that’s just going to be a thing that we do – or don’t do as the case may be – for the foreseeable future).
Sortilege, for sure.
Candles, for sure – with a goal of making enough from beeswax that using up a few dozen in one nights won’t be such a big deal.
Altars lit, of course.
Ancestor Plate… Maybe? We didn’t do it this year, but I could see it being part of the festivities in years to come.
Friends and chosen phamily in attendance, for sure.
Buckets of rich food and booze, definitely.
Will we ever do a masquerade? I doubt it. I’d kinda like to, but I doubt it. Not without a much bigger space and a lot of people willing to play along. It would be a bit of an iffy thing. None the less, it still might happen. (I could see us doing this for our fifth or tenth anniversary, if the timing was right – do a masquerade party that just happens to fall on Winter Solstice Propper as well. That would be a nice way to kick it off, with me as Lady Frost and her as Lady Fire. That could be fun).
 
I’m not sure that gifts play a major role in these festivities. At least not outside the realm of pot-luck desserts and bottles of wine and similar.
We shall see.
 

Once More Around the Sun
My Friends and Joy
Unto Us All

 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.
 
 
[1] It’s not like I don’t have a metric tonne of dark green worsted wool lying around at the moment, right? I could even bind in the golden musical garland stuff that always gets so tangled. Might not be a bad way to go.

Full Moon – Long Nights Moon Crests (and Wanes)

Well, my dears, we’ve made it through the breach. For those of us with SADD symptoms, at least, things will be getting a little bit better from here.
Of course, the cold is just starting to get bad. I hear it’s dropping to -31 tonight, and staying in that neighbourhood for then next little while.
I can’t say that I’m not grateful that this year’s ice storm managed, for some reason, to go around Ottawa, rather than through it. My dependence on electric heat is kind of a big thing at this point. :-\
We’ve had a LOT of snow, though. The plow burms are already four and five feet high (okay, not all along the street, but beside anywhere with a driveway? Yeah).
 
The full moon was technically a week ago, on December 17th – Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers. I wound up not attending any of the vigils or memorials this year. Stayed home, stayed warm, and worked on transcription, if you can believe it.
 
It was a big week on that front, by the way. You can catch up on some of the details here, if you aren’t abreast of the situation. Good news all around, and thank goodness for it. 🙂
We drank champagne to celebrate on the 20th. 🙂
 
As Long Nights Moon wanes towards the new year, I find myself huddling a lot. Yes, it’s cold and, yes, I’m a snuggly creature by nature, but there’s more to it than that.
Honestly, I find myself wondering exactly what it is that I’m avoiding.
 
Because I am avoiding things.
I actually gave up on my Make All The Things project, and opted to get everyone a book from the remainders bin for Secular Xmas instead. I think they’ll be enjoyed, and it was a definite load off my stress-levels, but a small part of me feels like I cheated by doing that.
 
My wife and I, having celebrated our first turn around the sun as a married couple, had a good chat the other night. A “looking forward” chat.
She wants to keep moving forward with her leather care business, has a business plan in the works and is looking at how to make shop-space affordable while she developes her client list and gets things off the ground.
I’m really proud of her. 🙂
I told her about wanting to continue moving towards a more cohesive magico-musica-sexual model of life and practice, as well as wanting to move forward on my Poly and Power anthology. I mentioned the course I’ll be taking in the new year, as well.
Browsing through old blog entries, I was reminded about the kind of life I’m striving for[1], and also of the concept of career as ecosystem[2]. Two things I need to keep in mind, to keep as compass points, I think, as I go forward in the coming year.
 
Stay tuned.
There will be tarot readings before long.
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.
 
 
[1] Specifically: “I want my LIFE to be this glorious mash-up of art and sex and joy and beauty, I want my LIFE to be built on, fueled by, and in a symbiotic relationship with, pleasure in all its many forms”.
 
[2] Not to mention the need to be conscious of how the many Things That I Do all tie into nature somehow – body-as-instrument (muscially, ritually, and in terms of SM), body-as-sexual-being, sex itself, blood and emotion, food and where it comes from, the materials I use in my art – all of it. All of it is bound up in this:

Queen of Earth

New Year New You – Reflections, Two Years Later

So, Miss Sugar did some reflecting on the as-of-now results (out-growths? Maybe that’s a better term?) of her New Year New You experiment.
 
So I thought I’d jump on that bandwagon and have a look at my own goals from Solstice 2011.
 
Specifically, I want to look at this:
 

I want my LIFE to be this glorious mash-up of art and sex and joy and beauty, I want my LIFE to be built on and fueled by, and in a symbiotic relationship with, pleasure in all its many forms.

 
I spent last summer learning how to structure a novel, and one of the key must-haves for the main character is a time-bound and measurable goal.
The above is not a time-bound or particularly measurable goal.
It’s an admirable goal, one that I still deeply want to achieve, but it’s not something like “finish a novel” or “update my etsy site once a month”.
 
Never the less, I do feel like I made some (nebulous, granted) progress.
At the end of 2011, I was working a temp job. I’ve worked one temp job in the past year, and I did it in a situation where my wife had been laid off unexpectedly and I needed to make sure the rent got paid. Otherwise, I’ve been coving my portion of the rent (typically about 1/3) plus the vast majority of our groceries and our various hotel bills and registration fees (two conventions – The Feminist Porn Awards back in April, and Unholy Harvest this past October) through my work with a queer-and-trans health organization (the day job), art modeling, fetish work & glamour modeling, craft sales (very, VERY limited), freelance writing (mostly content and landing pages), and transcription work.
Which is pretty good, as far as making a living goes. I wouldn’t be able to do it (at least not like this) if I didn’t have my wife contributing to our household income as well. But I’m holding up my end of things, even if it is by the skin of my teeth.
 
I have to tell you, from a “making money” perspective, things are… a little demoralizing, in spite of all that. My craft business is feeling like a non-starter[1]. Which is not the end of the world, but it’s still… frustrating. When someone buys a piece of my work, I am joyful and motivated to make a dozen more. But real-time craft shows aren’t reliably profitable enough (I don’t think I’ve ever failed to make my table fee back, so it’s not like I’m in the hole, but there have been a number of times when that’s all I’m managed, and it’s felt like a real waste of a day) for me to be confident in shelling out for table fees that I can only aford if I make money at the show. Online sales are rare – loved, but rare. I know that I’m happier making items for my home and as gifts (where I know they’ll either be used or – at the very least – be removed from my house) than I am making items for sales that might never come to fruition.
I didn’t get a whole lot of modeling last semester. I got some, thank goodness, and what I got was good money. But not as much as I might have. I’ve sent out my every-four-months email saying that I’m taking bookings for January-April, but I’ve only had one response (I’ll send another one out in early January, though, once the schools have started up again). The woman who reliably hired me for a full week (~18-22 hours at $20/hr) of modeling, twice a year, isn’t working this year (crap). Currently, I’m looking at alternatives, sending out applications, and hoping that I can get some more reliable (and/or more profitable) work in short order.
 
It’s really easy for me to get distracted by money.
 
I mean, go figure, right? This stuff that one needs to get by, day to day, is kind of a big deal, even if I wish it wasn’t. It’s really easy to get hung up on things like “If I’m doing crafts “for fun” (home use), rather than sale, then… why am I treating this as anything other than a hobby?” or “If I rarely get accepted for publication, hate the main character in my novel-in-progress, and rarely get paid when I *do* get published… why am I not just writing fanfic and finding a “real job[2]” to cover the bills instead of insisting on calling myself A Writer?” or various other variations on the theme of “I’m not making a realiable living[3] wage, so why am I calling myself a professional artist, again?”
 
And that distraction comes into play when I consider where I’m at in relation to that previously stated goal.
 

I want my LIFE to be this glorious mash-up of art and sex and joy and beauty, I want my LIFE to be built on and fueled by, and in a symbiotic relationship with, pleasure in all its many forms.

 
So where am I on this, and what steps am I taking to further it?
 
I spend a lot of my time being creative. Some of that is working on The Novel and other written projects (“Poly and Power: Queer Women Writing On the Intersections of Consensual Non-Monogamy and Power-Exchange” and “Eat The Seasons” potentially also titled “The Year of the Pig”), but a lot of it comes out in home-crafts like candle making, weaving, spinning, knitting, and (oh hell yeah) cooking.
The cooking, in particular, fits into the hedonism/pleasure part of that goal.
I’m supporting my wife as she builds her dream career as a cobbler and custom leather worker (it’s going rather well – she’s looking for shop space at the moment, and if she can make that happen, then we’re golden), which means I’m supporting pleasure and creativity and the making of beautiful things in the life of someone near and dear to me. Which I think is part of this deal.
I’m trying to find ways to get more and better-paying fetish-related gigs, partially because they’re fun and I like them, and partially because I think they’re in line with Where I Want To Go.
I’m looking forward to attending the Feminist Porn Conference (two days this coming year!) in April, and potentially going to Playground (we’ll see what their workshop line-up is like) in November.
I’ve signed up for a course on spirit work run by a kinky-type (I think) who gets stuff like ordeal rituals (which are connected to some of the stuff I do), and I’m working my way through Radical Ecstasy as well. I took a leather leadership course last year (which got cancelled part way through, but still), and started the very earliest parts of prepping for editing an anthology (finding a publisher being a big one – I think I’ve got one, so yay – and figuring out what I actually want the book to be about – also pretty much sorted). I’m going out to a leather-dyke bar night that happens to include a lot of karaoke, which means that I’m (eating really good locally-sourced food and) singing a lot more than I was this time last year. I continue to run my Poly and Power Salons. I’m paying attention to when magical/energetic stuff Happens to/through me, and trying to sort out how that works.
 
I’m working at it, is what I’m getting at.
 
I told my wife what my goal was/is, and she said “It kinda looks like you’re accomplishing that really well.”
And I said “Uh…” … Because there’s that unspoken “and make money at it” part that’s hard to shake. But, yeah. I’m getting there. I’m doing it. Now all I need to do is (A) do it more, and (B) get it to pay me reliably.
 
Wish me luck on those two fronts. 🙂
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.
 
 
[1] I read that book, Book Yourself Solid (Illustrated Version), and… yeah. Maybe it’s because I offer a product rather than a service, but there’s no cute quip of a tag-line for why people would by my jewelry or soap or lip balm instead of the next eco-freak’s, magical properties or no magical properties. “Pick-me-up treats made with Magic in Mind”? Accurate? Sure. But not necessarily something that makes me stand out all that much. Anyway…
 
[2] Meaning, of course, a job that eats 8 hours of my day, plus commute, give me zero personal fulfilment, stunts my creativity, probably also pays me inadiquately, and makes me want to cry in my cubical under Big Brother’s snearing, overpaid nose.
 
[3] Meaning “survival wage” because “poverty line” is so far above my personal gross income that it’s a distant dream, quite frankly.

Z is for Zap – Pagan Blog Project 2013

So a while back, I asked my wife to massage my hips, because they were aching terribly. (This is what happens when we sleep three to a bed, btw. The Queen isn’t nearly wide enough to let us all sleep comfortably).
 
She got an electric shock every time her fingers ran over the center of the ache.
 
This isn’t a particularly big thing, and maybe not much to build a post around, but I think it’s kind of astonishing, if only because it wasn’t voluntary.
I’m not at all sure what was going on there.
 
I guess where I’m going with this is that I can really only tell that I’m Doing Stuff when I can get some sort of confirmation from someone else on the subject. A case in point is that, more recently, my lovely wife was having a bad night and I was able to help her ground and focus by, energetically speaking, sloshing buckets of cold water over her.
I know it worked because she reacted by relaxing/untensing a little bit more every time I sloshed her.
But I asked her about it the next day in order to get confirmation that it wasn’t just a fluke.
And she felt it.
I don’t know if she felt it as water but she felt it as grounding/calming and reacted as such.
 
It’s probably not that weird that I need confirmation on these things.
But something I’d like to do is get to the point where I can be my own confirmation point. 🙂
For now, though? Those zaps of confirmation are a big help. 🙂

Spirit Work 101 (Del Tashlin)

So… I did a thing.
Or, more accurately, I signed up for a thing that will start in the new year.
I signed up for Del’s Spirit Work 101 course.
 
The course is $45. Which seems like a lot for once-a-month emails and a couple of skype sessions.
Would I pay that much for a subscription to Wiccan Candles or PanGaia? Not a chance. Not even if either of them sent out 12 issues a year.
But I have paid $100 for a year’s subscription to The Omikuji Project – which is twelve stories (hard copy form) per year, and no google-chats or, like, writing techniques.
So it’s not outside the realm of possibility.
Besides… If someone like Del (or Lee or Winter or anyone from Circles of Kink) turned up in my neck of the woods and offered three workshops through Venus Envy for $15 admission each? I’d be there in the front row. In a heartbeat.
 
So I figure I’ll give this a go.

W is for (Waiting, Warm-Ups, Wonder, Will, and) Woo – Greater Granola Blog Project 2013

Reblogging this from Syrens as it fits on this blog as well. 🙂

syrens

At the moment, between knitting and sewing and cooking and trying to write a novel, I’m working my way through reading Radical Ecstasy. I’m not quite halfway through, but I wanted to talk about some stuff that’s coming up.
Radical Ecstasy was published about ten years ago – it’s an oldy but a goody, as they say – and it’s about using S/M techniques to reach ecstatic states.
… Sort of.
 
It’s about rough sex as religious/spiritual experience;
It’s about building western style tantra techniques into kink and pain-play scenes;
It’s about sado/masochism as sex/magic as sacred/mystery;
It’s about sex and kink and woo.
 
Right up my alley in other words.
 
I love the woo that I find in my leather community. I love the discussions that come up at leather women’s brunch, talking about a particular colour of blue and how it matches from person…

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