From the author of The Witch's Feast, this is the first fully illustrated, comprehensive introduction to the handicrafts of witchcraft. Through over 60 craft projects, learn all the techniques you need to create your personalized magical toolkit. Empower yourself as a self-sufficient witch, and become a master of the natural arts! This in-depth guide, accompanied by step-by-step images, will show you all the craft and design skills you need to make your own, personalized and fully adaptable magical toolkit. Melissa Madara, magical expert, herbalist and witch, shares 60+ unique projects and techniques, many of which revive spells from the history of witches past. Approachable for beginners and stimulating for established practitioners, the crafts are clearly explained through luscious photographs, detailed research, useful charts, and easy-to-follow instructions. Once you are directly in touch with the power of these crafts, understanding deeply the processes and the associations of magical ingredients, you can be inspired to create all your own unique formulations. Chapters include: Incense, including kyphi temple incense, which once billowed from the temples of ancient Egypt, to house blessing incense for cleansing any new home. Inks, including dragon's blood ink and botanical drawing charcoals. Oils, such as flying ointment or the world's first known chemist Tapputi's royal salve. Natural dyes for creating stunning eco-printed ritual gowns or a spring equinox altar tablecloth. Papers, like Japanese knotweed paper or autumn equinox corn husk paper. Powders essential for rituals and spells such as scrying powder and banishing salt. Candles of all shapes and types, including poured, dipped and molded. With all of this knowledge, you can create altars, rituals and spells that are highly specific, personal and in touch with your natural environment.

“This spellbinding fantasy begs for a cozy chair and several hours of uninterrupted reading time.” —The Washington Post When Ned and his identical twin brother tumble from their raft into a raging river, only Ned survives. Villagers are convinced the wrong boy lived. Across the forest that borders Ned’s village, Áine, the daughter of the Bandit King, is haunted by her mother’s last words: “The wrong boy will save your life, and you will save his.” When the Bandit King comes to steal the magic Ned’s mother, a witch, is meant to protect, Áine and Ned meet. Can they trust each other long enough to cross a dangerous enchanted forest and stop the war about to boil over between their two kingdoms? “Barnhill is a fantasist on the order of Neil Gaiman.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune “[The Witch’s Boy] should open young readers’ eyes to something that is all around them in the very world we live in: the magic of words.” —The New York Times “This is a book to treasure.” —Nerdy Book Club A Washington Post Best Book of 2014 A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2014 A Kirkus Reviews Best Children’s Book of 2014 A Chicago Public Library “Best of the Best” 2014

From the author of The Witch's Feast, this is the first fully illustrated, comprehensive introduction to the handicrafts of witchcraft. Through over 60 craft projects, learn all the techniques you need to create your personalized magical toolkit. Empower yourself as a self-sufficient witch, and become a master of the natural arts! This in-depth guide, accompanied by step-by-step images, will show you all the craft and design skills you need to make your own, personalized and fully adaptable magical toolkit. Melissa Madara, magical expert, herbalist and witch, shares 60+ unique projects and techniques, many of which revive spells from the history of witches past. Approachable for beginners and stimulating for established practitioners, the crafts are clearly explained through luscious photographs, detailed research, useful charts, and easy-to-follow instructions. Once you are directly in touch with the power of these crafts, understanding deeply the processes and the associations of magical ingredients, you can be inspired to create all your own unique formulations. Chapters include: Incense, including kyphi temple incense, which once billowed from the temples of ancient Egypt, to house blessing incense for cleansing any new home. Inks, including dragon's blood ink and botanical drawing charcoals. Oils, such as flying ointment or the world's first known chemist Tapputi's royal salve. Natural dyes for creating stunning eco-printed ritual gowns or a spring equinox altar tablecloth. Papers, like Japanese knotweed paper or autumn equinox corn husk paper. Powders essential for rituals and spells such as scrying powder and banishing salt. Candles of all shapes and types, including poured, dipped and molded. With all of this knowledge, you can create alters, rituals and spells that are highly specific, personal and in touch with your natural environment.

Clover Harrison is a rare, triple affinity witch. After refusing an arranged marriage from her family, she went to Oregon to run her great aunt's potion shop and teahouse. There's a fearsome beast that all seers see in her future and Clover is driven to live her life to its fullest before she encounters the beast. Stanton Bruinwald is looking for his Ursa, the woman who will help him run his sleuth. Even though he's starting his search for her a year or two before most Alpha bears do, he feels the time is right. All he needs is some direction. Old friends and new come together in the third book of the T wisted Design Series.

'Diane Purkiss ... insists on taking witches seriously. Her refusal to write witch-believers off as unenlightened has produced some richly intelligent meditations on their -- and our -- world.' - The Observer 'An invigorating and challenging book ... sets many hares running.' - The Times Higher Education Supplement

In Fantasies of Gender and the Witch in Feminist Theory and Literature, Justyna Sempruch analyzes contemporary representations of the “witch” as a locus for the cultural negotiation of genders. Sempruch revisits some of the most prominent traits in past and current perceptions in feminist scholarship of exclusion and difference. She examines a selection of twentieth-century US American, Canadian, and European narratives to reveal the continued political relevance of metaphors sustained in the archetype of the “witch” widely thought to belong to pop-cultural or folkloristic formulations of the past. Through a critical rereading of the feminist texts engaging with these metaphors, Sempruch develops a new concept of the witch, one that challenges traditional gender-biased theories linking it either to a malevolent “hag” on the margins of culture or to unrestrained “feminine” sexual desire. Sempruch turns, instead, to the causes for radical feminist critique of “feminine” sexuality as a fabrication of logocentric thinking and shows that the problematic conversion of the “hag” into a “superwoman” can be interpreted today as a therapeutic performance translating fixed identity into a site of continuous negotiation of the subject in process. Tracing the development of feminist constructs of the witch from 1970s radical texts to the present, Sempruch explores the early psychoanalytical writings of Cixous, Kristeva, and Irigaray, and feminist reformulations of identity by Butler and Braidotti, with fictional texts from different political and cultural contexts.