Practical Magic Blog Partying!

 Last year's party was a great excuse for me to mix one of my favorite witchy movies with amigurumi. And this year I can mix the movie with my new found love of freezer paper!

Roses are a big theme in the movie and next week my middle school kids and I will be using rose stencils to design our own shirts. Granted, the middle school version won't be followed by the kids becoming possessed by the ghost of Jimmy Angelove. :) I thought I'd pass on the really easy & cheap technique. 

Materials Needed

-         Freezer paper (you can find it for cheap at most grocery stores)

-         Something you’d like to stencil (shirts, jeans, paper, almost all surfaces work for this)

-         Image to stencil

-         Permanent marker

-         Craft cutting board or cardboard

-         Exacto or craft knife

-         Iron

-         Sponge brush

-         Acrylic paint of the color of your choice

-    Optional: An extremely cute hamster that has escaped from his ball while photographing.

All total this costs about $15-$20, but it takes very little freezer paper and paint to do one stencil. Once you have the items, the only thing that may cost money is the thing you want to stencil on.

Step 1: Trace your image onto the freezer paper with the shiny side down (the shiny side is what will stick and peel off of the surface easily).

 

Step 2: Cut out your design with the exacto/craft knife. Make sure you think through how you’re going to do this ahead of time. Some parts can get lost in cutting if they’re not attached to the rest of the drawing – like a circle within a circle.

 

Step 3: Iron your surface smooth if it’s fabric. Place the stencil shiny side down where you’d like it to be and iron it onto the surface. This keeps the paper sticking to the surface so you don’t have paint bleeding under the paper (I wrecked a shirt twice like this.).

 

Step 4: Create a paint pallet and dab the paint onto the stenciled surface. DO NOT USE STROKES! This will move the paper around and cause bleeding.

 

 

Step 5: You don’t even have to wait for this to dry! Carefully peel off your stencil, and you’re done!

And the Winner Is...

...Daffy from Batcrap Crazy! And for those of you who didn't catch it, here's Daffy's absolutely hilarious bonus joke - not to mention a great one from Mrs. BC as well. :) Thanks guys!

A man and a woman were seated next to each other in the first class section of an airplane.
The woman sneezed, took out a tissue, gently wiped her nose, then visibly shuddered for ten to fifteen seconds.

The man went back to his reading. A few minutes later, the woman sneezed again, took a tissue, wiped her nose,then shuddered violently once more.

Assuming that the woman might have a cold, the man was still curious about the shuddering. A few more minutes passed when the woman sneezed yet again. As before, she took a tissue, wiped her nose, her body shaking even more than before.

Unable to restrain his curiosity, the man turned to the woman and said, "I couldn't help but notice that you've sneezed three times, wiped your nose and then shuddered violently. Are you OK?"

"I am sorry if I disturbed you, I have a very rare medical condition; whenever I sneeze I have an orgasm."

The man, more than a bit embarrassed, was still curious.
"I have never heard of that condition before," he said.
"Are you taking anything for it?"

The woman nodded, "Pepper.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

A guy goes to the supermarket and notices an attractive woman waving at him. She says hello.

He's rather taken aback because he can't place where he knows her from.

So he says, 'Do you know me?'

To which she replies, 'I think you're the father of one of my kids.'

Now his mind travels back to the only time he has ever been unfaithful to his wife and says, 'Are you the stripper from the bachelor party that I made love to on the pool table with all my buddies watching while your partner whipped my butt with wet celery???'
She looks into his eyes and says calmly, 'No, I'm your son's teacher.'

Witch City Wicks Giveaway!

In most video games when you get a vile of dragon's blood, you're supposed to chuck it at things to make them explode. Drinking it causes your character to get hurt, and you to start yelling at your husband, "Why did you DO that!? Quick! Get a potion of healing!" This is not one of those kinds of dragon's blood. This kind of dragon's blood comes in soy form. And I'm pretty sure that when you light the wick, it doesn't explode. :)

The candle is from Witch City Wicks - a soy candle Etsy store out of Salem, Massachusetts who has very kindly offered to donate one of its products to my giveaway! If you've never tried a soy candle before, I highly recommend it. They're a much nicer alternative to the cheap kind from the grocery store as they burn longer, and have wax that can be cleaned up easily with soap and water (good news for a witch like me who often has issues with wax in the carpet hairs). Not to mention, Witch City Wicks has some of the best names for their candles. Dragon's Blood is my current favorite, but I also enjoy Greenman, Tainted Love, and Bondage. If you'd like to win one of their products, here's what you do:

1. Be a follower through Blogger or Facebook. (1pt.)
2. Go to Witch City Wicks' Etsy page and check out their products. Come back here and comment on which one is your favorite. (1pt)

3. Leave a comment for me. (1pt) Preferably with a joke. (1pt)

4. Post a link to this giveaway on your blog & comment with the link (3pts)

I will be randomly drawing a winner on Monday, September 12th.

Good luck! :)

The Dark Side of Wicca, or, Forcefully Digging Up My Roots

I was going to write about the aerial acrobatics I saw over the weekend. I was going to write about magickal movement. But this subject will have to wait until another day because I've finally hit the point where I'm quite miffed with my local new agers.

If you keep up with my insanity, you know that I recently read the book, Diary of a Witch, by Sybil Leek. I wouldn't have pursued this book were it not for the fact that I have been grossly disappointed in the lack of history provided in most books on Wicca & Witchcraft lately. I've looked through my own collection and tried to sort out the truly informative books from the ones that offer just mild summaries. Unfortunately, none seem to cover the topic. They skip right to the "makin' magick" sections. Even Scott Cunningham takes a great leap over hundreds of years of history to magickal correspondences in his introductory books. Edain McCoy? Nothing. Laurie Cabot!? Zip! Phyllis Curott!? The woman whose book, Book of Shadows, inspired me to learn about Wicca in the first place!? Zilch.

I don't know if this pattern stems from historical ignorance, the need to sell books, or simple apathy. Whatever the reason, I've been on a quest for the last year to find as much material on Wiccan history as I can so I can spout more than just incantations (This way I can know where they come from). In addition to the Sybil Leek book I've read Gerald Gardner's, Witchcraft Today, Margot Adler's, Drawing Down the Moon, and most of Michael Howard's, Modern Wicca. The Golden Bough is also on my shelf, though remains a permanent hurdle next to War and Peace. 

For a long time the next book on my list has been, Diary of a Drug Fiend, by Aleister Crowley. And here's where the madness begins yet again. It seems that not only are Wiccan authors content to skip our history, but they are also intent on removing Aleister Crowley from the picture. While I've come to learn that he was quite the, well, drug fiend, womanizer, sadomasochist, and black magick artist, it doesn't give me an excuse to ignore his contributions to modern magick and Wicca. He might have been considered the most evil man in the world in the mid 1900's, but he also met with many famous witches - not to mention two of which were Gardner and Leek. And while his definition of magick alone ("the science and art of causing change in conformity of will") has been referenced in numerous books on magick and witchcraft, Crowley himself seems to disappear from texts.

In search of Mr. Crowley, I first tried my local new age store. Nothing. Not even a bibliography on the man. I asked at the front desk and got an offer to order. I went in order of books stores down the street.  Neither of the used bookstores had anything by or about him. And when I stopped at the other new age store and asked the sales attendant  if they carried any books on him she said, "No. We like to keep our material positive here." WHAT!? This is why we Wiccans are portrayed as tripped out hippies lady! Just because something isn't kittens and ponies doesn't mean it's not IMPORTANT! I briefly considered becoming a Satanist until I remembered Anton Levay's, The Satanic Bible (Yes. I read it. If I'm going to be accused of Satanism I should know what I'm not. And I don't think I'm cut out for Satanism. I'm too perky.).

I've resolved myself to finally ordering the AC biography, Do What Thou Wilt, by Lawrence Sutin, off Amazon. It won't be on my shelf for a while, but once I read it I'll let you guys know how it was.

Has anyone else found it unnervingly hard to find good historical data on Wicca? Have you ever hit the wall of "keeping things positive", as I have? I feel like this may be a common thing. Any good suggestions for history books?

By the way, in the list of Wiccan books with diddly squat on history, Silver RavenWolf actually wins for her book, To Ride a Silver Broomstick - just because she actually lists the Wiccan beliefs as set out by the Council of American Witches in 1974, as well as short descriptions on different traditions. It's still not too high a score though, as some of her descriptions err on the side of WAY too basic and even slightly wrong (For example, I'm pretty sure that a solitary witch is not the same as a natural witch.). But I'll stop there. Silver's a whole new topic all on her own. :)

Stickin' it to the Martha

For the last week I've been pouring through Stumbleupon's craft diy finds and thinking why I haven't been able to figure out how to make some kind of artistic masterpiece out of... I don't know... duct tape, a car bumper, and a live pony. I finally dug through my box o' stuff, and it may not be rocket science, but I came away with something. It's a flower pin that will go to my recently hitched friend - made from a button from her bachelorette party, fake rose petals from her wedding, and embroidered with her initial.

And on a segway rolling 5mph down the street with a little old man on it trying to be cool, yes, I have finally found a background that works, and I'm sticking with it.

P.S. It is currently 3:11AM. I can't sleep and my ear hurts (Making me really wish I could just take off my body parts like those orange guys from Labyrinth.), and I'm just now realizing that I didn't have anything for dinner except some tea and wasabi almonds. But none of that matters too much because I'm giggling at the only thing I can hear over my typing: shuffle, shuffle, shuffle...BANG!...shuffleshuffleshuffleshuffleshuffleBANG! The hamster's in his running ball. :)

Multilingual Magick

For those of you who have ever wondered about the lack of magick posts on here, it mainly has to do with the fact that my spells tend to be of the spontaneous kind. Very rarely am I one to plan out an entire ritual unless it's a holiday. Well, and unless I have time to plan a large ritual.

Last night in celebration of, and in preparation for, the start of the new school year I conducted an impromptu spell to help me draw upon my strengths. I needed to be reminded anew of all the things I was capable of doing and all the things that made me good at what I do. It might sound fairly run-of-the-mill magick, but if you've ever worked in a public school before, you know how political, dramatic, catty and horrible it can get. Going to work for me is like putting on a suit of armor - and this year my armor is a very heart-felt protection circle latched to my very skin. When you work with mostly women, and students with behavioral problems, you need it.

Something was different about this spell, though, in that I switched to Spanish in the middle. I am not fluent but I know enough to get me through a conversation. The spell came out as a bilingual one. And it must have worked well because when I had to draw on my Spanish today I was babbling with fluidity that I don't normally have (This is always extremely fun to me because of the look I get from the Latino parents when I start talking in Spanish. It's the one of pure relief and surprise that says, "Thank you, GOD! The small white girl can speak Spanish!).

Often times in Wicca we talk about the power of colors, symbols, elements, or beat. I think the spoken word gets lost in the correspondences. And personally, I find that Spanish is one of those things that I turn to when the flat and guttural sounds of American English just don't get across the feeling I'm going for. There's something powerful in rolling my R's, and calming in pronouncing those soft D's right in between my teeth. Although I know what I'm saying, it almost makes the magick I'm working that much more mysterious and emotional. Maybe it's the slight unfamiliarity I have with the language that does it.

I also speak a bit (a very very very petite bit) of French (At least enough to utter the phrase, "I can't study the history of the badger anymore! I've had enough!), and even that gets added into my spellwork occasionally.

I'm very curious to know. What are your experiences with language and magick? Do you switch between languages, and if so, which ones? Do you think we could put correspondences to languages just as we put them to the cardinal directions, altar tools, etc?

I think languages can be magickal, and switching between them almost even more so. Then again, languages can be hilarious too - something that can't always be said for our other magickal correspondences. :)

Doggy Demento, Tofu, and a Question for Moms

When I was in high school I got it into my head that I needed a new breed of pet. Hamsters were cute and all, but I was running out of small boxes and spots to bury them in the back yard. So out of the blue I opted for a parakeet. I named him Hermes and trained him more or less well, albeit the fact that most of his training involved trial and error with the windows. Nevertheless, after a few months my younger brother decided that he also wanted a parakeet. And that's how Tofu came into our family. You may be wondering what this amigurumi dog has to do with a small, blue bird. Well, the demented look on the dog's face (you know, the one that says, "I hunt the mice around the house by bashing my head into the wall!"), was the same one plastered to Tofu's that made him annoying beyond all reason yet strangely cute. 

The Tofu with wings managed to get himself stuck in our chandelier, inside a dresser drawer, and briefly, inside a toilet paper tube. He was also obsessed with defeating the other bird in the bathroom mirror, and frequently moved the battle to the reflections in the windows and to those of the spoons on the dining room table. They must have had differing political views because often times the spoons would go flying off the table edge with a satisfied and vengeful looking bird glaring down at them.

The following tofu has no wings, and gets along fairly well with spoons. Also, my amigurumi dog will be up for sale shortly, as will the pattern. Isn't train of thought fun? Ooh! Trains!

Cooking Adventure: Lime Curry Tofu Stir-fry
Source: Allrecipes.com
The Bellydance Soundtrack: Slavgnostik by Unkle Ho
Prep Time: 10-15 min.
Cook Time: 15-20 min.

I made this extremely delicious veggie meal after a full day of babysitting my nieces. I gave my four year-old niece the job of choosing lunch and she picked Kraft mac n' cheese, wafer cookies, and blueberries (the blueberries were so we could "be healthy"). While I seem to have lost my taste for powdered cheese a bit, I will say that it made making lunch for the girls really easy. As I was cutting up the veggies for this meal I had to wonder: How do you moms DO this? How to moms find time to make healthy meals for their kids? Especially since the easiest & quickest things to pick up from the store and whip together are not always the healthiest? I'd be very interested to know how those of you who are moms manage this, and if some of you could share your easy recipes with the rest of us. That, and do you have one arm that is ungodly muscular? I carried around the one year-old all day, and cuteness doesn't necessarily correlate with a decrease in weight. People kept passing me in the grocery store saying, "Aw! She's adorable!" I felt like saying, "Really? That's so nice of you to say! Would you like to carry her around for an hour while the feeling comes back into my arm?" Don't get me wrong. I love my nieces, but once they become accessories attached to me for too long the cuteness starts to wear off a bit.

Okay. I'm breathing. I feel better now. :) Onto the food!

Ingredients:

 - 2 tablespoons peanut oil

 - 1 (16 ounce) package extra-firm tofu, cut

into bite-sized cubes

 - 1 tablespoon minced fresh ginger root

 - 2 tablespoons red curry paste

 - 1 pound zucchini, diced

 - 1 red bell pepper, diced

 - 3 tablespoons lime juice

 - 3 tablespoons fish sauce (The original recipe calls for soy sauce. Don't use that. Use fish sauce. Smells really funky on it's own. Tastes amazing when blended with other stuff.)

 - 2 tablespoons maple syrup

 - 1 (14 ounce) can coconut milk

 - 1/2 cup chopped fresh basil

 

Directions: 

1. Heat the peanut oil in a wok or large skillet over high heat. Add the tofu and stir-fry until golden brown. Remove the tofu and set aside, leaving the remaining oil in the wok. 

2. Stir the ginger and curry paste into the hot oil for a few seconds until the curry paste is fragrant and the ginger begins to turn golden. Add the zucchini and bell pepper; cook and stir for 1 minute. Pour in the lime juice, fish sauce, maple syrup, coconut milk, and tofu. Bring the coconut milk to a simmer, and cook a few minutes until the vegetables are tender and the tofu is hot. Stir in the chopped basil just before serving. 

**Serve over rice. I used basmati & that works fairly well.