Big Gay Aunties R Us! (My Nibbling Was born This Morning!)

My sister gave birth to her first child today. The “official” (read: roughly when said baby was all the way out of my sister’s body) time of birth is ~10:45am Calgary Time (AKA 12:45pm, where I’m at).
This child’s name is a deliberately unisex name. Whether this is because the parents are clueful enough to prep for the possibility that their new-born son may turn out to have been their new-born daughter all along, or just for the sake of some other sort of convenience, I have no idea, but this Big Gay Auntie is happy to see that choice regardless.
 
I finished my nibbling’s baby blanket today, sitting on the back porch in the sun(!) on the first really beautiful, honestly warm day of Spring. New life into the world. Persephone comes above ground again, and this baby came with her. ❤ (Granted, I doubt my non-practicing-but-technically-Abrahamic sister would be totally thrilled about being put in anything resembling the role of Demeter). I sang blessing lulabies into the yarn as I finished off the last rows, blocked it in a bath steeped with lavender and salt.
It's now roughly the size of a couch-throw, so considerably bigger than planned. My hope is that I can schlep it to the laundromat early next week and put it through a hot wash + hot dryer with a load of towels and socks and stuff, so that it'll shrink, felt just a little bit, and, hopefully, set the dye.
 
Right now, I'm trying to speed (Ha!) through a coordinating scarf (I know, I just said it was finally WARM outside, but my sister's getting a coordinating cowl, and I want both the parents to have a Thing to commemorate the birth of their first child that just happens to be completely devoid of Baby Markers if you aren't intimately familiar with a certain Security Blanket that (hopefully) gets dragged around everywhere) for my Brother-in-Law, so that when they eventually all drag themselve to my (Read: my MOM's) end of the country, I can hand them over with all due ceremony.
 
Anyway. Lovely Wife and I were hosting a bunch of people for coffee and similar when the call came in, so I got to announce it to a (small) room full Awesome Queer (and mostly, if not entirely, poly and kinky) Chicks who'd been asking about the knitting project I was trying to finish, so. 😀
 
Welcome to the Family, and the World, kidlet. We're happy to have you here. 🙂

Q is for Quilt – Pagan Blog Project 2014

So, as-you-know-bob, there’s a tonne of stuff out there (relatively speaking, at least) about spinning and yarn as can be used in magic – spinning for trance work in Seide, for example, or using yarn (hand-spun or not) for binding or other knot-magical purposes. But, being as I’ve started sewing more of my own clothes of late, and being as one off-shoot of that is that I’ve got a small (thank goodness) but growing (er…) bag of scrap fabric sitting in my craft cabinet, I’ve started wondering if quilting isn’t somewhere in my near future. To that end, I have started wondering how quilting can be turned to magical purposes.
I mean, there’s the obvious stuff – stitching pieces of people’s old clothes together in the form of patch-work is a way of binding them together, strengthening family ties, and so-on – but I’m wondering what else it can do.
 
Creating quilts as devotional art, for example, by choosing colours and patterns that would appeal or depict your patron deities. Quilting wall-hangings that fit with a given seasonal rite as it pertains to your own bioregion. The act (and final product) of quilting as a multi-layered means of ancestor remembrance/connection – both as a skill-set and with regards to which fabrics get used. Using the pattern of stitches to, say, cursive-write a spell directly into the quilt without “lifting your pencil” (that would actually be really difficult, since quilts are on the big side and needles tend to need re-threading multiple times during the quilting process). Including specific elements/components in the quilt’s stuffing or stitching different stone beads into a quilted wall-hanging might also apply.
 
Right now, the fabric scraps I have are bits of various wedding dresses (mine and my wife’s) plus some scrap fabric from a dress I made for myself, and the odd shirt or two that I’ve tailored. Not a whole lot to work with, spell-wise, but using scraps of my own clothes – stuff I’ve made for myself because I wanted something specific to fit my needs and my desires – could be a great way to quilt a glamour spell for myself, for example, using the quilted fabric (with or without some sort of warming in-between layer) to create a magical dress or skirt for myself – in the same way that I’m creating a Fetish Shawl for myself out of yarn that I’ve hand-spun and then knit into various stripes – and treating it as a means to stitch bits of my empowered, desirous Self back together.
 
Might be worth a shot.
 
Thoughts on quilting magic? Ever tried it? How did it go?
 
 
TTFN,
Meliad the Birch Maiden.

Hematite (And Some Serious Woo)

So. I recently made something for my girlfriend. She’s been under a lot of stress lately and she needed a little help carrying it.

Out of the blue she asked me what hematite is, because the word just floated through her head unbidden.  I told her it was iron ore, that it absorbed negative stuff, that it’s a good grounding stone and, incidentally, that I also have a heap of it in my beading bag.  How convenient.  Of course this was exactly what she needed in her life right then.
So I made her a hematite pendant (three, stacked 8mm hematite spheres on a twist of silver wire) and strung it on a strip of red leather lacing (personally significant, plus the colour looks really good on her), and she hasn’t taken it off since. 🙂  She’s says it’s really doing the trick, which is excellent news, and I don’t mind telling you.

 

It’s funny. As a jeweler, I pull these groups of stones together and, by and large, I’m doing it for aesthetic reasons.  I don’t think (much, if at all) about what kind of influences I’m sending off to be hung from the ears of strangers.

Take, for example, my piece “The Sea with it’s Deepness” (yes, I did a collection based on the poem in A Swiftly Tilting Planet. Even with all the very xian references and the Noble Savage tropes in the actual book, I’ve still always enjoyed that poem).  I made it from lapis lazuli, iolite, and pearls.  Near as I can tell, I’ve managed to make a pair of earrings that would work for fostering healing and compassion in their wearer. Unintentionally.

 

So that brings me to a question: In magic, Intent is a significant part of the deal. But I’m wondering: Have you ever been in a situation where (to pick an example totally and completely at random) you badly needed to learn how to communicate or desperately confused by the swirling maelstrom inside your own head… and also found yourself going “Oo! Shiny!” at every piece of Sodalite you came across?

I wonder if we aren’t drawn to certain stones (or plants or whatever) because they correspond to something that we need to strengthen in our lives.

 

(How weird is it that I can yack about spell-craft and ingredient lists and correspondences in the practical sense of things, but when I start talking about “manifesting” things into your life I end up going “Okay, this is too much Woo for me…”. Anyway).

 

So that’s my thoughts about that.

 

– TTFN,
– Meliad the Birch Maiden