twofaced-bone-dragon:

Dollar Tree: Witchy Edition!

I’m currently browsing witchblr and it occurred to me that, as a Dollar Tree employee, I do a lot of my witchy shopping at the Dollar Tree (because I’m poor because I work at Dollar Tree lmao). I feel like Dollar Tree is one of those stores that you don’t really know what all they have unless you work there, or if you go inside and spend an hour or two just wandering the aisles and perusing the stock. So I wanted to share some of my ideas for dollar store witchy shopping, for the financially strapped witches of the world!

Note: I am absolutely not saying that you need supplies/items to be a good witch. The most important part of practice is intent! Your chosen deities will not fault you for not being able to have pretty glass bowls and sweet pea candles. Witchcraft is about the purpose and the intent behind your spells and rituals, not the items you have!

Okay, let’s get started! I’ll update this post as I find new things that can be used, because it’s a weird hobby to go in on my days off and just browse…since I have no life and nothing better to do.

• Candles

Alright, so I will readily admit that the candles from Dollar Tree are not the strongest smelling candles in the world. The Pillsbury ones, which are some of my favorites, are pretty strong and I love making my room smell like a butter cake. But for the most part, most of the candles don’t smell super strong and won’t smell up your whole house like a Better Homes or Yankee Candle will. However, I think they are perfect for altar use, or just to have on your desk in your bedroom. I do all of my practicing in my room, since I share a student apartment with 3 other girls, so this isn’t a big deal for me. As an artist, color is a huge focus of mine, so when purchasing candles from the dollar tree, I go largely based on color. For unscented candles, we sell a lot of votive and taper candles, as well as tea lights! These are mainly white, but we do have some cute striped ones at my Dollar Tree every now and then. We also have some incense, but I haven’t tried it.

• Candle Holders

I’m putting this in it’s own section because we have just as many candle holders as we do candles! I personally love when we start getting seasonal tealight holders in. We get Halloween, Christmas, and winter/spring/summer/fall themed holders in a lot, which are generally kept in the seasonal area at the front of my store and not with the rest of the candle items. In terms of year round candle supplies, we usually have ceramic holders of so many shapes and sizes I can’t even remember them all, as well as metal and glass cups/stands for tealights, votives, pillar, and taper candles. We have star shapes, leaf shapes, round, square, anything you can think of! Come buy candle holders from Dollar Tree!

• Altar Cloths

Okay, this was something I actually came across as an idea on Youtube, and I’m kind of annoyed at myself for not thinking of it before! But I also don’t use an altar cloth, so… Anyway, in the kitchen section you can find silk table runners in quite a wide variety of colors. If you’re setting up an elemental altar, we have red, green, and blue at my store, as well as neutral white and brown. I personally would go with the white or cream colors, since my altar is multipurpose and I dedicate it as needed. The runners are 12 inches wide and 72 inches long, so I think they would fit most altars unless yours is super compact!

• Vases/Jars

Y’all. My store here in Rexburg has SO. MANY. VASES it’s not even fucking funny. We sell a lot of glass product, which in turn tells corporate to just keep sending us more, and we don’t have all the shelf space needed for all the shipments we get, so we end up having to stack open-faced boxes in the aisles. It’s pretty terrible, lol. Anyway, if you go on the Dollar Tree website, you can see that we have a pretty large selection as far as size and shape goes. We sell Mason jars as well, which are a favorite of mine. I don’t usually buy these in bulk, so it MIGHT be cheaper to buy your mason jars in packages at Walmart or something, but I buy as I need them, and Dollar Tree is still my favorite for vases and pebble terrarium jars just because their selection is way better imo.

• Chalices

I’m using a fancy word to describe what’s essentially a wine glass, but I have five different glasses that I’ve bought from the Dollar Tree, and I love them. There’s normally a really good variety of color and even shape (stemless, stemmed, margarita, etc). The seasonal glasses are my favorite, because they’re normally decorated beautifully. For fall, the glassware/dishware had autumn leaves, and this year our spring collection glassware was a gorgeous sapphire blue! If you are a fan of liquid offerings/faery libation brews/etc, check your Dollar Tree!

• Picture Frames

If you have an altar, it’s pretty standard that you have some representation of your deities on it. My primary deity is Bast/Sekhmet, and I also have some representation of Ptah, and while Bast is represented with a figurine that I saved up for specifically, Ptah is represented by a small 2×2 canvas I did an abstract painting on (since I’m an artist and follow him as the god of the arts). Whether you’re starting out or you just don’t have room for a statue, some people prefer to represent their deities with icons. You can paint your own or print one off from the Internet, but you’re probably going to want a frame to put it in! Dollar Tree has a massive selection of photo frames, usually, and mine even sells different sized photo stands (in different colors!)

• Glass Dishes/Bowls

Also for people who like liquid offerings, Dollar Tree has a number of glass salad bowls and crystal-like glass bowls, flat dishes for food offerings, or even just for decoration! They come in multiple sizes as well, so you can get really tiny ones for decor or normal dinner bowls for offerings. The smaller plates can also be used to hold items that you’re consecrating.

• Misc Supplies

So depending on what kind of witchcraft you practice/deity you worship/spells you cast/etc., a lot of your general supplies can be found at the Dollar Tree. Here are a few recommendations for pretty basic supplies:

1. Matchsticks, the brand is Diamond and they come in a box of 300

2. Saltines/crackers (I use these as a basic food offering)

3. Nuts/other snack foods for offerings

4. Pints of milk if your Dollar Tree has a fridge section, if you’re meticulous enough to have a separate food stash for your offerings (I know some people who are)

5. Notebooks. I’m not very picky on what my grimoires/books of shadows look like. My current book of shadows is a composition book with a bunch of kawaii art on the front…:D

6. Salt, you can buy a big container of it for 50 cents

7. Other herbs/spices in decent sized containers, if you’re into kitchen witchery

8. If you don’t have an athame and want a knife specifically for carving into candles or something, you can find singles and packs of kitchen knives.

9. I like to decorate my altar according to sabbats, so for decor, the craft aisles have bags of river gems, stones, and aquarium stones as well as a variety of flowers. There’s bags of hot glue sticks if you need them for a hot glue gun (which I use a LOT); ribbons and rolls of decorative mesh, and depending on the holiday they get themed color rolls of these items in as well; there’s garden decor like birds, dragonflies, etc for floral decorating that can be used in a number of ways; bags of sand; foam blocks in multiple shapes of floral arranging; and in fall, there’s always a large selection of autumnal decor to choose from (just be sure to get there early in the holiday season for fall items, as they start being set out in September and sell fast!).

That’s all I can think of right now. As I said, I will continue to add to it as I find new things!

magicianmew:

You
don’t need tools. Everyone tells us that, and it may well be true. But let’s
be real, they do legit help you focus especially when you’re new, and witchcraft is all about focus. For me, as an empath, they also reduce the amount of energy I have to expend on a spell. Beyond that, hell, there’s just something nice about physical ritual and creation. And why wouldn’t there be, with a practice based on crafting? We all have our thing we connect to, process-wise. Personally, I have a much easier time focusing and making witchy shit happen if something’s on fire at some
point in the process. Mmm, fire. Anyway…

But just because you
want or need tools doesn’t mean you need to spend every cent you make on it the way it sometimes seems when you browse a pagan store, or even online witch communities. And for a tradition that’s always been primarily about
empowering the oppressed and the have-nots, personally, it irritates
the hell out of me that so much of modern witchery has gotten… well, so
elitist and classist. You’re not witch enough unless your grimoire is
made of the hide of baby otters and your rosemary was harvested by
Indigo children in the enchanted forests of Dunedin.

Fuck that.

I, for one, wish I saw more inexpensive, DIY, and found tool witchery portrayed as not only doable, but meaningful and beautiful.

So here are my ideas on how you can get a good flying leap on your witchy cabinet (or witchy
rucksack, if you’re nomadic or homeless) for under £10. I’ve done some of these myself and I’ll post pics of how awesome these can really look.

What you need for…

Sigil craft:

Nothing. You can write sigils in water if you want. Personally, I often make sigils with honey in the bottom of my tea cup.

But if you want to make your own, which requires a fair bit of trial and error, or ya just really like writing shit down…

• Pen
• Paper

You
probably already have these. If you don’t, then buy a packet of
cigarette rolling papers. They’re thin and a bit see-through (perfect
for tracing your sigil if need be) and obviously they’re designed to
burn cleanly if you want to burn them to activate them. 50 to a pack. £1 or less.

Buy a pen. Or knick one at the desk of your local annoying government agency. No judgment. Less than £1.

Sigils
can be charged in a variety of ways that are absolutely free. Energy
manipulation, holding them to a pulse point on your body, tearing, even
visualizing while having an orgasm.

Candles:

• Tesco has 100 tea lights for £2.
• Lighter and/or matches. Anywhere. Under £1. Matches are sometimes free.

Divination:

• Do you have a rock or stone? Does it have a hole in it, or can you put one in it? Stick an earing wire through it and attach a necklace chain. Pendulum. Shazam. Here’s mine.

• 

• Does your rock not have a hole in it? Make some netting out of thread, tie it around the rock, and then use either more thread or a necklace chain for the support. Pendulum. Double shazam.
• Got some playing cards? Cartomancy.
• Got anything that plays music? Shufflmancy.
• Got anything with a shiny screen, or access to it? Scrying.
• Got a stick? Slice it up and draw some runes on the cross sections.
• Got water? Hydromancy.
• Got a candle? Cyromancy. Pyromancy. Ceromancy. ALL THE -MANCY’S.
  

Herbs:

• Look in your cabinet if you have one. You
  probably have at least salt and pepper. Both highly useful, especially
  salt. If not, both together will cost you under £1 at Tesco.
• Or you
  could always just swipe some packets from McDonalds. Again, no judgment.
• If
  you want more, go down to your nearest Asian or Indian market. That is
  where the bargain herbs will be – often large quantities for under a
  pound. It may be harder to buy small quantities, but it’s worth a look
  before you go to the supermarket.
• Also, if you have the domestic
  stability and the green thumb to do so, it’s worth looking into whether
  it would be cheaper to grow your own.
• Also consider what kinds of
  local plants you can find growing free, and would be useful to you.
  Dandelions? They’re everywhere, and super magical. I use the little
  purple flowers that grow in the cracks in the concrete outside my door. I
  don’t even know what they are (therefore I am careful not to consume
  them), but they represent home for me.

Crystals:

• Any piece of jewelery you have that has any sort of stone on it.
• Any piece of glass; use it like quartz, although it seems to drain a bit faster.
• Rocks you find. There’s tons of pretty and magical stones to be found in forests and beaches and gardens.
• Coal. Yup, coal. Actually, um, guys? I LOVE coal for energy absorption and clearing. You should try it.

Containers for storage and spell jars/bags:

• Any tupperware you might have.
• Any containers you might empty (sauce jars, etc).
• Ziplock bags.
• For highly mobile containers, cut an inch or two of a straw, melt the
  end to seal it, fill with whatever, and melt the other end to seal that
  too. Free at any fast food place that has soda fountains.

Wand:

Find a stick you like. This is a environmental craft, dude. Get in the spirit!

Chalice/cauldron/stuff for putting stuff in (we’re going cheap here, so multi-purpose is a thing):

• Any cup or bowl. Hit the pound store if for some reason you don’t have one, or want a special one.
• An ashtray. Possibly one you found sitting outside, looking sad and lonely at a restaurant. No judgment.

Athame:

• Any knife.
• Or even, again, a fast food place that has plastic knives that you can deck out if you want.
• Or an awesomely sharp chipped rock.

Besom:

• Any broom.
• Find a pretty reed and use that. Great for a mobile mini-besom for altar use. Or lash a bunch of reeds or thin twigs together onto a long stick and make an actual full-size broom.
  Results can be frickin’ beautiful, by the way. I made one that I love. All
  found materials. Behold (this was right after the reeds dried from soaking to soften them, so it wasn’t as fluffy as it is now).

• 

Travel altar for nomadic/homeless witches:

Just some examples with the stereotypical altar layout, but really, you can use anything that’s small enough for your needs…

• Any little container. Altoid tin, old spice jar, jewelery box, whatever. You could even use a piece of fabric and bundle everything up in there, and it could double as an altar cloth when you untie it.
• Thimble, bottle cap, or folded tinfoil for cup/chalice for water.
• Birthday candles, anything red or orange, chilli pepper or spice for fire.
• Dirt for earth. I mean, obviously. What’s super cool about this is that you can take it from wherever you are, which gives you an automatic connection.
• Found feather for air.
• Whatever the hell you want for your focus point. Draw a pentagram on paper. Use
  your favourite ring you wear everywhere. Use a pretty rock you like.

Most of these can either be found quite easily or gotten for less than a pound.

Grimoire:

• Any notebook.
• Make a digital grimoire. Probably the cheapest way to make it pretty
  too. I mean, have you seen what people can do with a simple Tumblr blog?
  If you do it in Word or Google Drive, you can download all kinds of cool
  page borders, free.

So there ya go. And thing is, a lot of witches won’t even want or need all of these things. Not into crystals? Don’t get any! Ain’t got time for altars? Don’t make one! So in reality, a lot of witches could spend considerably less than the cost of getting all of these.

But if you did decide to acquire all of this, now you have materials for sigil craft,
candle magic, a million kinds of divination, basic staples of herbal and crystal magic, storage
containers, spell jar containers, both a regular and
travel-size altar, and a grimoire. That’s a pretty good set of kit.

At best, you spent literally nothing at all. Most people will already have most of these things anyway.

Some
may need to buy some of these things. But at the end of the day, the vast majority of these things can be found or made for free quite easily, with a couple of exceptions. By my best guess, poor or homeless witches in most places wouldn’t need any more than approximately £3 to £5 if they were starting with nothing, their goal was to
acquire something from every category, and they could not ask loved ones to spot them supplies.

Some of these are not as
over-the-top gorgeous as the artisanal stuff people buy off Etsy. But
you know what? It’s sure as hell authentic. This is what witches have done for eons: use what’s around them. Witchcraft is not
about flashing how much money you have. And nothing’s stopping you from decorating with whatever you have.

Witchcraft is for everyone, not just folks who have £200 to blow on an athame.

Even if you have the £200 to blow on an athame, there is something really rewarding about crafting things yourself. This is, after all, witchcraft. I am privileged enough at this point in my life that I could have bought a lot of the stuff I decided to make or find (and sometimes making is more expensive than buying, though it’s fun and meaningful), but honestly, my DIY and scavenged tools usually speak to me more than my purpose-bought tools do.

It’s worth trying and seeing how it changes how you feel about your work. Give it a shot. And if you do, share with me! I wanna see!