Moonshine Junkyard

There is no describing how much wondrous fun we had at our witchy women gathering! (or should I say womyn to honor the new-agey 90s vibe of "the craft") Every element that I could have dreamed up for my dream-night actually happened ! Here I am getting ready; at the last minute I decided to wear my hand-dyed purple Gunne Sax dress along with a pouch containing rose quartz, an amber necklace that was a wedding gift from Jocelyn, and a dyed blue scarab beetle. Oh, and Emily and I both went barefoot. Here we are, Em and I, so damn ready for this night! We've planned it for weeks. It was all her idea, having loved Practical Magic since she was a preteen, so much that she actually watches it more than once a week to this day. No joke. Here's the gathering place (my living room of course) all set up and ready for magical crafts and coziness.   And a close up of our "altar," I suppose you could call it. Darin made so much fu...

This Friday we are planning a witchy women gathering at my house. About ten of us ladies are getting together to have some lovespell fun making our own homemade spellbook, watch Pracitical Magic in all its ridiculous splendour, and then have midnight margaritas! In preparation, I've been dusting off my old magical and mystical books and naturelore and folklore. Anne Kent Rush made the most amazing hand-drawn hippie books in the 70s. If you ever see this one at a used bookstore, I recommend you snatch it up. It's full to the brim of enlightening details about the moon, our human relationship with the moon, female spirituality and fertility and ritual associated with the moon, and all kinds of legend, folklore, myth and ceremonial practices. I cherish it. Check out this lovely drawing: "Do you think that too," she said, "that I have slept too long in the moonlight?" (from one of my favorite novels, Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys)...

you know those little word verification thingies that pop up when you leave comments? i think sometimes they're sorta neat. like the title of this post: vitivery. i like it. i like to pronounce it with the short i, emphasis on the second i. that really should be a word circulated in the common vernacular, and many of the other ones are cool too like "shumite," "warlit," and "pregicit." so i'm gonna randomly and variously use them once in a while. anyway. it's a rainy day. again. therefore, i:  cut bangs. totally stole the idea from my oh-so-inspirational sis-in-law amy. went thrifting where i got my sickly hubby this poncho which he immediately snuggled into:  and also got this album that my goth friends used to love and proceeded to listen to it all day: and snugged my shyest little sweetie cat daphne (aka beanie): and wore my ultra soft, thick, cozy bamboo tights: i also strewed my crafty stuf...

Saturday night brought another fine show of musical acts. First up, my dear friend Doniella who writes the most quirky lovely folk songs about loneliness, San Francisco, mermaids, the Grapes of Wrath, and home. A poet soul, this one. She sang her Steinbeck song straight to me, from one lit lover to another. I'm so jealous she actually has a teaching job and thus a forum to share this love! Here she is in this shawl her sister just brought her from Spain (I fell in love with it) and with Nihar, in their handsome matching glasses. More couples in cute matching glasses: Joey and Em. And then Darin played! This time their band was in another incarnation known as Loomfixer in which they play Darin's songs rather than my brother Joey's. Both are incredibly rad. This show sort of blew me away. I mean I knew my hub is magical and all, but the strange and mystical lyrics to his songs transported me. You should hear him triumphantly sing this on...

We stayed up almost all night long having a clothing swap and telling secrets at our slumber party at Rebecca's house. It was sort of like being thirteen but with way better stories! The lovely Ryann in a vintage skirt I brought which looked so pretty on her; gotta love when old clothes get fine new homes! Ashley tries on the 60s tennis dress: Lesley is a vision in blue! Cozy girls, Breanne and Ashley: \ Mallory, wine, pajamas, OH MY! Rebecca shows off her son Sylvan's Lego kitty. Poor Sylvan, he and his dad got home late and stayed in the other room due to the whole "no boys allowed" thing. And at one point he said, "Dad, all those girls out there are distracting me!" He was very excited to get to join up with the lady folk in the morn for breakfast at Cafe Bernardo and point out the mannequins in storefronts along the way (one of his endearing obsessions). We finally fell asleep at 5:30 a.m, damn party animals. ...

blustery rainy stormy windy; still asleep when the power went out. therefore naturally today i am renamored with the blustery foresty windswept melodies of ms.Vashti Bunyan. and dreaming of her 1968-69 horse-drawn-cart trip north out of London to the island countryside of the Outer Hebrides in search of Donovan's elusive commune Skype. (oh it was so much more romantic a term then!) she and her lover never found it; alas the artists and hippies had packed up by then, but she had two years of dirt roads, woodsy paths, lovemaking, summers and winters, folk song lullabies, crumbling cottages, stories and birds and life on the road in a carriage drawn by horses. not to over-glorify, but sounds like heaven to me.  today is a daydreaming sort of rainy day. has anyone had the luck to see Vashti Bunyan: From Here to Before, the documentary about her aforementioned travels? i can't seem to get it from netflix yet and i'm keening. here's darin, coz...

My friend Stan walked in today, took one look at me and said, "What - are you Blossom?" or something along those lines. And I got very excited to suddenly remember the show Blossom, although I was not intending to channel her style and I always identified more with her friend Six anyway: see what I mean, I would totally wear Six's outfit but Blossom's could unfortunately never be me: Which got me thinking about the 1990s and styles that are back in as if they ever really went out, a topic that Milla from The Girl Who Married a Bear has posted eloquently about here and here . It's hard to take current 90s-ish trends very seriously if you lived through it and never really left...and by the by, can it really be considered "vintage" if it was one decade ago? Incidentally, isn't Darin sort of a Joey Lawrence? Oh, one more thing about Blossom - I once dreamed that my brother Matt and his wife Amy had a baby girl they named ...