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Tonight I finished my Zine! I didn't even talk about this over on the 'gram. I have a decent amount of Pagan devotional poems I've written and I felt it was enough to compile into a nice little zine! I am super happy with how it turned out. It has pretty pictures to go alongside the poems. I used to draw a lot, but my art wasn't suited for the look I was going for with this zine since I wanted the classic photocopy look with that art nouvaeu, old-school pagan publication feel. I wanted something that looked like it was hot off the Magickal Childe press, with all kinds of fonts no regular publishing house would use.

For the art, I lucked out thrifting for books because I found one of the old copies of Dover Publication's free graphics books. It came with the CD unopened, full of royalty free jpegs! Who needs AI art? Not I! I hauled out my gasping husk of an old laptop to give the disk drive one final spin. After about 10 years of waiting (10 minutes), I had copies of over 500 Art Nouveau-style jpeg clip art, flourishes, and borders! I was relieved to find something like that because I used to use Pixabay, but now they are unreliable, just teeming with AI art. The book had plenty for me to use to complete my zine!

Oh, I suppose I should also follow up on that last blog. I did make the sistrum, it turned out pretty neat. Also my spoon wands didn't sell on FB Marketplace, so I still have them. Oh well.

I have this idea in my head that I eventually need to get out. I want to craft a sistrum out of bottle caps. I have bottle caps leftover, so I've already just nailed holes through them. I'm a fan of reusing materials where possible, and honestly those would just end up in the garbage. I do wish we had actual recycling, but we do not. Thus, I try to take boxes and convert them into cat scratchers, and I take things like vegetable scraps and make broth and such. To make a sistrum, I'll need to find a really good and thick forked branch. Preferably one I can carve into if I have the energy. I've seen people make them before, but I've never been a fan of the look with the raw branch. Carving it and painting it bright colors is probably going to be the way to go to coordinate with the colorful bottle caps. If I'm going to make soething out of trash and scraps, I might as well go big or go home! I'll have to take a walk around and see if I can find a good stick.

I've also recently added some handmade spoon wands to Facebook Marketplace. I made them a while ago with custom grimoire pages explaining the correspondences I chose for the tools. There are 5 of them, an elemental set, but I am selling them individually. They are some of my favorite pieces I've made, where I carfully wood-burned them and wire-wrapped the crystals onto them. You get the wand and the page, great for a kitchen witch!

I have been adding more gradually to my little witch hat I posted about on Instagram. Today, I finished off a Turkey Tail mushroom. I want to add at least two more of those. Sometimes I think about stitch-witchery and fiber magick, and I think one of the coolest things about it is that you can add intent and correspondence within every stitch, but also in the form the final shape takes. Botanical shapes could hold the correspondences and symbolism of that plant! I'll be considering that as I add more vines and flowers and mushrooms to my hat.

Today, I created a new website for myself. I wanted a site that is free to begin with, and one with a host I support. I appreciate Neocities keeping things old school, so I decided to go with them this time around. My original website was expensive, and the way I had it formatted I did not truly love. Admittedly, I wasn't the biggest fan of Wordpress either. The layout I liked was not going to be supported any longer, and I didn't know enough about web design and development at the time to really do anything about that. It didn't seem reasonable to keep paying so much money for a domain and hosting when I wasn't happy with it. So here we are now! Hopefully this little corner will turn out nice.