I’m currently working on a few new type of items for my Etsy shop. I’m hoping to have a few ready to list by this weekend or early next week!
I’m most excited about my grapevine wreaths. I harvested a bunch of wild grapevines over the weekend, during the new moon (in Libra!) during a light rain. It was also the day of a solar eclipse, though it wasn’t visible from Ohio. This is significant for witchy people who work with lunar, astrological, and/or meteorological energies in their practice.
I decided to work with grapevines in honor of Geshtinanna, the Mesopotamian goddess who is known as The Grapevine of Heaven. She is the sister of Dumuzi, Inanna’s consort in Mesopotamian mythology. Geshtinanna is a goddess I’ve been curious about for a while, but didn’t know a lot about, other than her relationship to Inanna through Dumuzi, and didn’t know how to actively work with her.
I made a handful of small wreaths that I’ll use to make witch bells. I made a few medium and full-sized wreaths as well that can be decorated when they dry, though I’m not sure if I’ll add those to my online shop or not yet. I’m not sure if shipping costs for something that large and fragile would be reasonable enough for potential customers to be willing to pay. I’m experimenting with a method to quickly dry the wreaths, so if that goes well, I’ll have a few witch bells available this weekend.
I’m also experimenting with resin to make items like altar tiles, runes, decorative storage containers for crystals, herbs, and other magick components. I’m still working on consistently not having bubbles in the cured resin, finding the appropriate amount of pigment to add to the resin for the desired amount of translucency, and keeping my hand steady enough to apply paint to the finished items.
And of course, I’m working on cuneiform tablets. I’d like to make molds of some of these to also offer resin versions for something a little different from what other “scribes” off. I’m still working on finding a silicone that works well for the molds. My first attempt didn’t turn out as well as I had hoped. I might re-sculpt these before attempting to make a new mold anyway. Some of the wedges aren’t as neat as I know I can make them.
In addition to the clay tablets, I’m also working on little resin figurines based on my clay sculptures. As with the tablets, my first attempt at a silicone mold didn’t come out exactly right, so this is going to take a while to perfect as well.
I’m also looking into more environmentally friendly resins to use going forward. I’m dumb and didn’t think about the fact that most “resins” sold for crafting are, in fact, made mainly from plastics and not actual resin from a plant.