Every Day Stuff and… My Bread “Recipe”. :-D

So.
I’m listing to an old Modern Witch podcast, with a couple of candles burning (all parafin – I’m trying to use up my parafin candles… again. Even though I’m rather loving the option of candle light any-old-time that I want it. I’ve used up the wicks in a huge candle center-piece… thing (it was a house-warming gift back in 2004, at Mabon) which involved glitter and candles shaped like apples, and… it’s just this huge lump of wax now, still with the glitter, and with, like, fake flowers stuck in it… And I want to melt it down and make new candles – possibly by using espresso mugs to make container-candles – and gift them to my mom (most likely) when Secular Xmas[1] rolls around.
 
There’s snow on the ground now, and it’s dark by 5pm. Winter has arrived.

Crafty Crafty – Soap, Candles, Earrings, and Etsy

So I’m trying my hand at felted soap again.
I’m using a very well-cured bar of lemongrass-ginger soap (tallow-based, as it happens. I’ll use tallow, lard, and similar for home-use soaps, but not typically for soaps that I sell at craft shows. I find that it squicks people out a little bit) and have wrapped it in some of my roving – here I’m using silk-merino (the lighter peach/amber) and coridale (the darker orange/rust).
 

Lemongrass and ginger soap, wrapped in silk-merino and coridale roving.

S is for Smoke (and Shielding) – Pagan Blog Project 2013

So today is Friday – which means today is the day I set aside (in theory) every week to do divotions, prep ritual supplies, and similar.
It doesn’t always work out that way, but it’s nice to be able to make the time. 🙂
 
Today, I’ve made two dozen candles, lit up my altars (huzzah!), and – finally – got around to smoking my house. I say “smoke” rather than “smudge” because… I feel a little weird about using that particular terms (see this entry for reasons why that might be).

Friday Crafting

I like Fridays.
In my work-from-home routine, they are they day where – provided I’ve got everything else done, and sometimes not even then – I get to blog as much as I like, the day I’m most likely to throw together the kind of dinner that requires a bit of forethought[1], and the day when I do most of my devotional stuff (officially – unofficially, things can wander a bit).
It also means that I’m slightly more likely to actually get to see, and hang out with, my lovely wife – who works multiple jobs, herself, but all outside of the house – for the next couple of days. Which, seriously, I fucking miss my wife. And miss fucking my wife. All of the above.
 

Talking About Crafts

Hey.
 
Okay.
 
I’m listening to this New World Witchery podcast about blending secular holidays with religious Pagan (Wiccan) ones, and it’s really kinda neat.
 

Crafting Update – Candles (and, to a lesser extent, Jewelry)

Flower Moon started about a week ago (for all that the actual flowers have been around for ages). Chances are that the flowers in question, this year, are roses and hawthorn blossoms. The crocuses and service berry blossoms of cooler months and earlier new moons are long-gone, and the apple, pear, and cherry trees are putting out their fruit (long from ripe, yet, but you can see it forming). Bu the hardy roses I see in people’s front yards and lining parking lots, parks, and bus terminals? They’re just opening up right now, a dozen shades of pink – from palest blushes and bisques to magentas, fuschias, and madders so deep they become purples and reds – filling the air with their scent and their promise of summer still coming into its fullness.

I’ve been working in the wonderful world of crafts today.
I’ve worked on my Honey-Month-inspired earring collection, and I’ve also made beeswax candles.

Not many of the latter.

One is an experiment to see if the “dark beeswax” pre-tabbed tea-light wicks I got actually do have a two-inch burn pool. If yes, I’m set for making votive-esques. If no, it’s back to the drawing board (but at least I’ll have lots of tealight wicks). I’m burning the last of my previous (thinner wicked) votive-esque in the hopes of doing a refill (there’s lots of unburned wax in this one) while switching out the used up (soon) wick for one of the new, thicker tealight wicks, just to see what burns better/more.

The other candles – seven in total – were re-fills (new wick, replenished wax) for the tealights that live on my altars. My altars are all lit up now. It’s been a while, so I think my gods are happy for the quick meal. I’ll have to spend some time doing refills on the beeswax tea lights I made earlier so that I don’t run out. (They are shallow tealights – they only burn for an hour or so, typically – so I go through them pretty fast).

I find my new wicks are (possibly due to being thicker) slower to light. We’ll see what else is different about them – will the tealights burn faster because the wick is thicker? Will they burn more evenly/completely?
We’ll find out! 🙂

My tealights don’t look anything like this.

Anyway. That’s my crafting update.

TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden. 🙂

Wish I May, Wish I Might…

So.
Not surprisingly, I missed the meteor shower last night. I’m not much of a night-owl and am typically asleep by 10pm. (The flip-side is that I tend to get up with the sun — great in Summer, not so great in Winter. It’s a good thing I work from home).

But it’s floated through my mind that this is as good an excuse as any to talk about wishing and, more generally, practical magic.

There are two sides to my “spirituality”. The religious side – which involves making offerings, hanging with my deities, caring for my garden, tracking the wild (and not so wild) foods in my neighbourhood, and so on. And then there’s the magical side.

I identify as a Kitchen Witch. What that means to me is (a) I engage in spell-craft, my witchiness is directly linked to the magical stuff I throw together (religiously, I’m more likely to ID as a Goddess-Animist, for example), but also (b) when I say “throw together”, I really mean it. I’m very much of the “use what you’ve got (in the fridge)” school of both cooking and magic which, I gather, is pretty much the polar opposite of ceremonial magic.

What do the ingredients mean? To you? To your culture? Your found & chosen tribes?

Wishing – on stars; on birthday candles; on pennies tossed, like offerings, into moving water – is an old practice, and one we learn early from family members, day-care workers, older siblings. We learn it young enough that there’s a part of us, no matter how jaded we get, that can still believe, can still Know, that it works.

So why not use it?

I know that magic works best as a door-opener, a means of turning the tides of something to your favour, rather than a means of making something impossible come to pass without a lot of real-world work. (Classic Example: You are not going to magically get yourself a girlfriend, no matter how many candles you light, if you don’t get up the guts to go to Queer Femme Karaoke or otherwise attempt to meet people who are at least wired to be into your gender).

None the less, you’ll never know if you don’t ask. Thence wishing, thence candle-magic, thence mojo bags and amulets and milagros, and every other thing that people have come up with to nudge the powers that be towards giving us a leg-up.

What do you wish on?

Photo from http://outdoorottawa.com/2011/08/catch-the-perseid-meteor-shower-this-weekend/

– Cheers,
– Meliad the Birch Maiden