A few years ago, I led a smoke cleansing (smudge) stick making workshop at the OBOD’s East Coast Gathering event. As that event often has upwards of 100 attendees, I spent months growing and harvesting materials for the event so …
crafts
A Beltane Blessing: The Magical Art of Pysanky Batik Eggs
When I was a child, my family and I would spend hours carefully drawing melted beeswax onto eggs and dyeing them, the rounds of successive colors growing darker and darker. Once an egg had been fully dyed and covered in …
Introduction to Wildcrafting and Foraging, Part I: Equipment, Resources, What to Learn, and Timing
I’ve been spending a lot of time talking about various wild foods and other kinds of wildcrafting and foraging on this blog, and I wanted to talk today about the principles of wildcrafting and ethical foraging more broadly. This post …
Hand Papermaking, Part 1: Recycled Papermaking
This is a post on papermaking using recycled fibers. I also have two posts on natural papermaking with cattail heads (which works well) and cattail leaf (which needs some improvement). The commercial process of producing paper is an incredibly environmentally …