Greetings and Welcome to DIY Witchery!

I’m Alex  Wrekk (they/she) I am an agnostic secular witch and have built my personal witchcraft practice over 15+ years. I am the owner of Portland Button Works and the Spiral House Shop I am an organizer for CritWitchCon, librarian at the Archive of Witchcraft, Magic, and Occult Zines (AWMOZ), I’m 45 year old punk,vegan, anarchist, feminist, and zinester (itt means I make zines).  I identify as white, bisexual, and a relatively cis woman. I love DIY projects, building altars, making charms, collecting jars, filling my pockets with acorns, zines, travel, befriending crows with peanuts, my Jackie Cat, Ian B, my house and home and things I grow in my garden while living in my 120+ year old house in Portland, Oregon. 

I have built my own practice and I do not discuss particulars about it very often. I call it DIY Witchery because it is built on my personal DIY punk ethics and methodologies. It takes a hands on and trial and error approach to witchcraft. ie: fuck around and find out magic.

I don’t cast spells so much a build them and then release them.  From the outside it probably looks like cottage witchery set loose in a punk house of a philosophy student drop out. In reality, I probably draw a lot on folk magic, traditional witchcraft, and a twist of chaos magic for the fun of it.

I got tired of this being so long so I’m putting a “cut” here.

Keep reading

lemonsharks:
“bees-with-swords:
“anexperimentallife:
“ orangecatbuttz:
“ rcktpwr:
“ slimetony:
“ petbud:
“he’s not ugly he’s handsome
”
distinguished
”
rugged
”
This motherfucker survives a lightning strike and you have the gull to call them ugly??...
lemonsharks:
“bees-with-swords:
“anexperimentallife:
“ orangecatbuttz:
“ rcktpwr:
“ slimetony:
“ petbud:
“he’s not ugly he’s handsome
”
distinguished
”
rugged
”
This motherfucker survives a lightning strike and you have the gull to call them ugly??...

lemonsharks:

bees-with-swords:

anexperimentallife:

orangecatbuttz:

rcktpwr:

slimetony:

petbud:

he’s not ugly he’s handsome

distinguished

rugged 

This motherfucker survives a lightning strike and you have the gull to call them ugly?? If mother nature cant kill them what chance do you have when this mofo comes after you?!

Reblog Lightning Bison for protection from lightning.

When you reblog Lightning Bison, Lightning Bison gets 200 metres closer to the journalist who called him ugly

He’s not ugly, he just got a florida shaped scar on his hump

lyridmeteorshower:

Very Brief Guide to [tumblr], for Reddit refugees

Shit You Must Do Right Fucking Now:

  • Change your profile picture, blog header, and title to something other than the defaults. Do it right now. You will be mistaken for a bot otherwise, and blocked.
  • Go into Settings -> Dashboard, scroll down to Preferences, and turn off the options in the picture. This will get rid of most of the algorithmic stuff.
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  • Turn off Tumblr Live. You have to snooze it once every 7 days for some stupid reason. It’s hosted through another company and will steal your data if you use it.
  • Go to your blog settings (under the little person menu) and turn off these two settings:
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  • Turn off infinite scroll (lags the site) and turn on timestamps on posts, in the same menu as Preferences.

Basic Features of the Site:

  • Reblogs drive the entire site. If you’d upvote something on Reddit, you’d reblog it on Tumblr. You can add text, images, or tags to a reblog, but you’re not required to.
  • The dashboard is the equivalent to your Reddit feed, and contains the posts of all the people you follow, with the newest at the top
  • You can send an ask to someone, and it’ll appear in their askbox for them to answer. You can receive them too, or turn off the settings if you don’t want.
  • Tags aren’t actually used for finding stuff (search function is dogshit), but are more for categorizing. People also talk in tags. Because Tumblr is weird, you can’t use quotation marks (“) or commas in them without fucking it up
  • You can filter both tags and phrases under Account Settings; doing this will put a filter over a post that contains them, which you’ll have to click through to see the post itself. Useful for avoiding hate speech or blocking out annoying stuff
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  • You can make polls in posts. Here’s one now.

holy shit it’s a poll

cool!

ooh clicky clicky button!! i wanna press it!! lemme press it!

you can add up to 10 options btw

  • Likes are useless. They literally do fuck-all except send a notification to the OP.

Stuff Tumblr Does That Other Sites Don’t:

  • Very old posts (I’m talking from like 2012) often circulate on this site. There’s no such thing as a post being "too old” to reblog
  • Blocking is highly encouraged; you can block someone for any reason. Even for just being annoying.
  • If you and someone else are following each other, you are mutuals. Mutuals are fucking awesome and are treasured like friends. Mutuals are a thing on other sites but Tumblr treats em differently.
  • You can screenshot someone’s tags if you like them and add them to a reblog. This is called “peer review”
  • Sometimes someone will find a blog and go through it and like/reblog a bunch of posts. This is totally fine and not “creepy” like it is seen as on other sites.
  • Tumblr jokes often rely on Continuing The Bit and a “yes, and?” attitude. Goncharov is probably the best example of this.
  • We are fucking infested with bots. They will either have totally blank profiles or be filled with porn. Block and report on sight.
  • Censorship is pretty lax here. I can say “I want to brutally stab Elon Musk to death and watch him bleed out in front of a crowd” and nobody gives a shit.

General Etiquette:

  • Don’t try to do epic clapbacks here, you’ll probably just get laughed at or blocked. If someone is bugging you or spouting bigoted bullshit, block them.
  • Reblog art!!! Artists often struggle to gain traction on here; reblogging will give them a boost.
  • Not every reblog needs a comment or tag in it
  • You can go all out with tagging your stuff to organize it, or you can just leave it all blank. Someone might ask “hey, can you tag these posts as [x]?” and you can decide if you want to do that or not. It’s generally polite to oblige, but “no” is still reasonable.
  • Avoid discourse like the plague. Filter it, block people who start it, scroll past it when you see it. Just don’t get involved in it. Ever.
  • Don’t put fandom tags or jokes on someone’s posts about serious matters or personal shit
  • You’re responsible for curating your own dashboard; if you complain about constantly seeing stuff you don’t like, that’s probably on you. Don’t be afraid to unfollow.
  • Follower count doesn’t matter much here and you don’t have to make yours known if you don’t want to.
  • Reblog, don’t repost. Reblogging keeps the credit and doesn’t “steal” engagement like Twitter retweets.
  • If someone likes something a LOT, they might reblog it like 30 times in a row. This is normal
  • Having a post blow up is actually kinda a bad thing, since it floods your notifications. There’s a sort of in-joke about how having a big post is awful and people jokingly try to stop their own posts from blowing up, often in vain.

Tips:

  • Get XKit Rewritten if you’re on desktop, it’s a really helpful extension
  • In the little drop-down menu next to the ‘Post now’ button you can either save a draft, schedule a post, or add it to your queue. The queue lets you post things in order at a certain interval, which you can change. It’s good for spreading stuff out over time.
  • You can use Shift+R to quickly reblog stuff and Shift+Q to queue!
  • Filter your notifications under Activity - you can also see some neat graphs
  • Find each other! If you want your old Reddit communities to stick together, seek out other refugees and follow them.

Have fun on [tumblr], everyone!

upthewitchypunx:

Cool. Opened up the old tub surround to find how shitty my ex-husband’s DIY skills were when he put it in. All of the projects in this house go like this. I should know by now that everything he did was shit and needed to be redone properly.

So, our bathroom update is gonna take a little longer. Gotta replace drywall with backer board. Fun!

At least I got to watch crows make crow soup like a weird cooking show on the tree stump outside my house.

Yup, still have no shower. At least we have a tub?

There have been more complications that require an actual plumber who won’t be able to get here until Tuesday. I was hoping that I’d have a shower for my birthday on Monday, I did not. At least I got the odd window frame painted and that film that adds rainbows when light comes in. I still need to reglaze the window and caulk it and paint the ceiling and trim. Once to old shower hardware is removed we can get the tub surround installed and the new hardware installed.

We got a shower curtain with a moon on it….  I’m tempted to get this moon light for the ceiling.

image

Once this phase of the bathroom is done I’m going to rest for a bit before redoing the floor tile.

The kitchen is half done too. We have the new fridge, kitchen cart, and hood for the stove. The countertop, painting, and lighting will have to wait.

If you were wondering what I meant by “other obligations” in my birthday fundraiser to attend the Viridis Genii Symposium (you can still donate and get a zine!), these are the updates I meant.We also need to redeck our porch. Once we get a new housemate and all that’s sorted I hope to build some sort of structure in our front yard for our shop. We keep getting requests for people to come by and we just don’t have space for that at our home.

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Tess heard me open the gate to put orders in the mail box. She stared at the door until I opened them, then flipped around on the gate to let me know where I should throw the peanuts.

Whenever I make sauerkraut in my house I think about how odd it is that I literally live on the same street but 50 blocks away from where my great- grandmother made sauerkraut when my grandfather was a child. And I think about how sad it is that he hated it and hated the smell of it and didn’t pass on a family tradition to my mother who ended up finding she like it later in life. It’s some sort of ancestral healing in a way.

rose-colored-tarot:

upthewitchypunx:

upthewitchypunx:

Ian B is making more sauerkraut and like a good animist I greet it every day to welcome it to the family.

Say hello to our fermented friend.

image

@upthewitchypunx Do you perchance have the recipe for this? I’ve been meaning to try a sauerkraut and I LOVE the Bavarian style.

We started watched BA test kitchen during the pandemic and Ian B said that if that wierdo Brad Leone could make it and not fuck it up, then he could too.

Here’s the recipe that we have and I know if mixes up imperial and metric but we’ve made it several times and it always works.10 grams salt for every 1 pound cabbage but ours ends up looking like this:

  • 1 ¼ pound cabbage shredded
  • 13 grams salt
  • 1 teaspoon mustard seed
  • 1 teaspoons caraway seeds
  • 2 cloves garlic chopped

put cabbage and salt in big bowl and crush with hands to get moisture to come out and let it sit for 30 minutes, come back and add the rest, crush again, let rest 30 minutes.

Put it all in a mason jar. The trick is to try to keep all the cabbage under the water in its own ecosystem. There are burper tops you can get. We have rubber tops with a nipple type thing that fit where the flat of a mason jar would go. We also have a wooden tamper, but anything to smash it down everyday for two weeks would work.

Talk to it and welcome it into your home. When done, store in fridge with a regular lid. It should last for about 6 months, but we have eaten it longer too.

We are growing gochujang peppers and I’m excited to make kimchi this year!

I have had a rare experience where an order has gone missing. It shows it was delivered but the city and zip code it says it was delivered to is not even the city it was supposed to go to. so, I filled a form online to ask what’s up. Then it gave me...
I have had a rare experience where an order has gone missing. It shows it was delivered but the city and zip code it says it was delivered to is not even the city it was supposed to go to. so, I filled a form online to ask what’s up. Then it gave me...

I have had a rare experience where an order has gone missing. It shows it was delivered but the city and zip code it says it was delivered to is not even the city it was supposed to go to. so, I filled a form online to ask what’s up. Then it gave me this notice asking me not to use profanity! I did no such thing!

windvexer:

nobody who interacts w/ this say the word “trickster” challenge

Wonder how many people out there are working with unknown and/or personal spirits inherent to their personal path

but they continuously try to label and assign these spirits names from lore

constantly try to figure out of this random dryad from the oak tree they grew up next to is really Anubis or really Hermes or really Loki

until the spirit is like, “ok if it’s going to get us to the next lesson faster, *puts on mask* Yes I’m Hermes!”

like we’re incapable of looking at them in the face so they put sock puppets on their hands so we have something simply shaped and brightly colored to look at while words of the Other are whispered in our ears.

or, you know.

Maybe it never happens at all.

Ian B is making more sauerkraut and like a good animist I greet it every day to welcome it to the family.

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