I grew up making do and using what ever was available. My parents didn't spend money unless they absolutely had to, so their artistic child had to make art with items already found around the house.
Thankfully, my mother was a seamstress so I had a fair amount to choose from. Being resourceful is something I take great pride in and actually love doing: it is a fun challenge, expands my creativity, and is good for the earth. I even incorporate making do into my magickal practice. About 90% of the resources I use for creating magickal items are post consumer and nearly 75% of the resources I use for spell crafting fall into that category as well. The trick is knowing what to save and how to use it. My best rule of thumb is to think outside the box.
Items I recycle on a regular basis and how I use them in my magical practice
- Broken Jewelry: creating charms or amulets, embellishing handmade magickal items, decorating my altar
- Brown Paper Bags: creating spell packets you intend to burn, writing spells, drawing spells for sympathetic magick
- Candle Stubs: sealing spells or containers of herbal concoctions
- Chicken Bones: crafting, opportunity/positive change spells (wishbone)
- Coconut Shells: creating amulets, peace/healing spells
- Coffee Grounds: enhance energy with in a spell, fixing the nitrogen in my altar plants, creating exfoliating scrubs
- Crown Royal Bags: crafting, storage, spell bags
- Egg Shells: energy/life/new beginning/fertility spells
- Fabric Scraps: crafting, spell and mojo bags, making twine, creating poppets, making herb pouches
- Glass Jars and Bottles (with lids): storing herbs and herbal concoctions, creating witches bottles, impromptu candle holders, containment spells
- Hair Clippings (with permission): personal magick
- Scraps of Wool Yarn: tying spell packets, making witches ladders, knot work, stringing amulets or talismans
- Tin Cans: to use when melting down wax with out creating a huge mess
- Toilet Paper Tubes: making large spell packets to burn
Items I collect from nature when they are presented to me and how I use them
- Animal Bones: species specific workings and mojo bags/talismans
- Drift Wood: crafting
- Fallen Leaves: crafting, decorating, clearing negative energy, wind magic
- Feathers: crafting, attracting energy, representation of the Elemental Air
- Pine Cones: protective spells, holiday decorating
- Pine Needles: protective spells, holiday decorating, creating incense
- Pruned Tree Limbs: crafting, starting fires
- River Rocks: crafting, representation of the Elementals Earth and Water (body/strength and blood/emotion), soothing/healing spells
- Shells: crafting, representation of the Elemental Water
- Shed Skins (snake or beetle): new life/growth spells
- Stones: crafting, representation of the Elemental Earth, soothing/healing/protection spells
Of course, this is not an exhaustive list of items used in my magickal practice and the way I use these items may not be textbook, but results are what matter and magick is very individual. I also use a lot of herbs from the health food store and some that I wild harvest locally.
Most of my crafting items
wreaths, thread, buttons, picture frames, mirrors, beads, and even fabric are purchased post consumer at yard sales and thrift stores and then cleansed. I have read that using secondhand or post consumer items can contaminate ones magick, but I do not find a significant difference in the energy coming from the majority of the items I find used in comparison to those coming from a factory.
Honestly, factory work is no fun. How many factory workers do you know who carry around a ton of positive energy? Rather they are new or used, items that have an icky feel to them just don't come home with me.
