Saturday 23 November 2013

Hurry Up and Wait

There are times when no matter how much you want to get on with stuff, you just can't. And today is one of those days for me.

We recently had a new photocopier installed - hooray! Which will do colour photocopies - even more hooray! But they are expensive (eleven times dearer than the black and white copies - boo) which means we can't afford to put colour piccies in the catalogue just yet.

The copies are lovely, nice and crisp. And having the colour facility has meant we have been able to launch some new products, laminated posters and calendars with colour decorations. And I have LOTS of ideas for all sorts of fab new bits and bobs.

Which is great as long as the photocopier is actually working.

Now one of the things with working for yourself is that you often end up working when other people are not. And weekends are a fab time for us to catch up with work, complicated orders, making stuff, developing ideas etc. So this morning the photocopier ran out of black toner - no warning just 'I need toner now! Feed me or I will just sit here and hum and ignore you!'

So do the photocopier service people work on a Saturday? No, don't be silly.

So now we can't complete orders because there are items which need photocopying and of course it will be Monday before I can order any toner and therefore Tuesday at the earliest before I get any. You may ask why I haven't got a spare toner bottle for just this kind of emergency. I asked the service people several times for spare toner, 'Oh don't worry,' they assured me 'We can get it out to you really quickly.'
On Monday I shall be ordering TWO bottles of toner so that we do have a spare.

So I can't photocopy, don't worry there are loads of things I can get on with. I need to create a one off spell kit for a customer. One of the components which would be ideal for this spell kit is a Nutmeg charm, great I can get on with preparing the charm. So I find the Nutmeg jar - it is empty. It will be Monday before I can get out to the supplier to buy some more nutmegs (the irony being, of course, we went past there on Friday when we were visiting another supplier for packaging materials).

Oh well, even if I compose the kit I still can't print out the instructions anyway - because the photocopier isn't working.

Right only one thing for it - I am going to play WoW.


Tuesday 12 November 2013

Love Spells are Tricky

Because of my work I am often asked for advice on spells for various purposes. Sometimes it is money matters, finding a job, getting back money that was loaned out, healing spells, spells to get justice or stop bullying of one kind or another

But the spells I find the most tricky to deal with are love spells as you very rarely find out all the circumstances which might be relevant.

There are two kinds of love spells: the first is where you are seeking to draw a suitable lover into your life - and with these do remember to put in there somewhere 'an it harm none'. The second type of love spell (and this is probably the more common one) is where you have seen someone you fancy and the spells are designed to draw that person and that person only into your life and become your lover/spouse.

Do not kid yourself that this is 'white' magic, it most definitely is not. These spells seek to subvert the will, choice and inclinations of another person.

Sometimes I am amazed by how much people will kid themselves in order to justify what they are doing. And the times I have heard 'It is only a love spell!'

One woman explained that she needed a spell to draw her 'soul mate' to her. After some questioning it turned out she had her eye on a chap she passed regularly in the street on her way to work and they had literally only said 'Hello.' in passing.
She knew that he was married with a small child (she had made it her business to follow him and find out about his circumstances) but was adamant that once she had got him, he would realise that they were soul mates and meant to be together.
Never mind that she would break up his existing, happy, relationship and deprive his child of its father.

Another chap cam to us to draw his wife back into their relationship, she had gone off with another man, but he knew this was just a silly mistake and he loved her and wanted her back.
After more questioning I found out that this was not the first time she had 'run off', that she was a teenager (he was in his 50's) and had gone to the same chap that she had left him for before, and the way the husband had got her back last time sounded very much like forcible abduction.
 The young couple had fled the district and none of her relations would give the husband their new address.
I refused to help as I knew where my sympathies lay.

Then there are those who are not sure what they want. They want a certain man or woman, but only on their own terms. For example they might want their partner back but only if he gives up gambling/taking drugs/ seeing other women.
Fair enough. But DON'T do a love spell to bind the chap to you if you are then going to be pushing him away because he is not behaving as you want him to do.

If you want someone enough that you are prepared to do a love spell to get them, then you take them lock, stock and barrel. Good and bad. If you aren't prepared to do that then you do not love them enough to justify working a spell on them.

And just in case you are tempted I will remind you of the rule of three :
           Everything you do of a magical nature returns to you three times over,
           the good that you do and the evil that you do.
If you do a spell to make someone love you you must live with the results. You could be condemned to three times the happiness you expected, but equally may well also find that you will get three times the heartbreak because of it



Friday 1 November 2013

Witch Crafts

It is lovely when I get the chance to be creative in one way or another.

Sometimes is is creative writing: taking a magical slant on an everyday activity for example. Cooking is something we do everyday, and it can be very magical taking raw materials and transforming them into a delicious meal, but you can add more magic to your cooking for another dimension to the task - pouring healing energy into a soup for example.

Today I have been doing things which might be considered more conventionally 'crafty'. We have just created our own A4 calendars for next year, one with a Celtic theme, another Witchy one, and this morning I was laminating the papers to make them robust and wipe clean so they will stay looking good for the whole of 2014.
And while I was laminating them I suddenly thought that is might be nice to have a version with a Fairy theme. So I shall be having a go at that within the next few days, We have a lovely old book which has some fab 19th century colour illustrations which I think would be just the job. My main problem is finding the book which is hidden within plain sight on one of our many bookshelves - and we have bookshelves in just about every room in the house.

When I'd finished that I went on to start making some large wooden altar pentacles. I had worked out the design earlier in the week and drawn it up in pencil on one of the circular pine plaques I had chosen to use. The main part of the design is, of course, the interlocking pentacle, but I have incorporated symbols for the God and Goddess, and two snakes representing the powers of Yin and Yang (the opposite and complimentary powers which create balance within the universe). As the pentacle is the symbol of the Earth element within the magic circle, I wanted to also reinforce that idea and have done so by including three further symbols for the element of Earth. The first is the triangular symbol found in ritual magic, the second is the circular symbol used to represent the sphere of Earth on the Qabbalistic Tree and the third symbol is a very ancient one found all over the world which is a square with a smaller square at each of its corners. This symbol represents the magical castle with its four watchtowers.

Once I had drawn the design onto the wooden plaque, I then used my pyrography tool to burn the design into the wood. I love this process, the smoke rising from the wood smells of bonfires, with the occasional puff of sweetly aromatic pine resin.
This part takes a while as the process of burning the wood cools the tip of the tool down so you periodically have to wait for it to heat up again. Also as the wood was quite resinous in parts, when a good piece of resin burns it sometimes makes a high pitched chirruping noise, rather like a small bird. The dogs had to keep coming to investigate where I was hiding this little creature, so I had to put my tool down to avoid being knocked, or singeing a doggy nose.

Graham has been out collecting some wood for us to make into palm wands. I have an idea in my head about trying to incorporate some gem beads into these - I am not quite sure yet how to do this, but I am looking forward to having a bit of an experiment.

We have a file full of ideas for magical artifacts, tools, charms and much more. Just need to decide which one(s) to try next.