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.