Symbolism Of The Color Red In Slavic Culture - From Polish Perspective

WTF is... Death Posture anyway?

Before we get into it, I have a little disclaimer:

Warning: Do not attempt this technique if you have serious physical or mental health problems. I take no responsibility for any damage this practice causes you. You have been warned.

So what the fuck is death posture anyway? You’ll hear lots of chaote’s throw the term around without much explanation. Simply put, it is a kind of alternate form of meditation. Of course, it is a little more complicated than that. Austin Osman Spare, the creator of death posture, defines it in the following way in his book “The Book of Pleasure”:

“Lying on your back lazily, the body expressing the condition of yawning, suspiring while conceiving by smiling, that is the idea of the posture. Forgetting time with those things which were essential-reflecting their meaninglessness, the moment is beyond time and its virtue has happened. Standing on tip-toe, with the arms rigid, bound behind by the hands, clasped and straining the utmost, the neck stretched- breathing deeply and spasmodically, till giddy and sensation comes in gusts, gives exhaustion and capacity for the former. Gazing at your reflection till it is blurred and you know not the gazer, close your eyes (this usually happens involuntarily) and visualize. The light (always an X in curious evolutions) that is seen should be held on to, never letting go, till the effort is forgotten, this gives a feeling of immensity (which sees a small form ), whose limit you cannot reach. This should be practised before experiencing the foregoing. The emotion that is felt is the knowledge which tells you why.”

So that’s all well and good, but lets put it into some more modern terms. This is the way that I do death posture. Keep in mind, this is just the way I do it, and there is not an “absolutely correct” way to do something in chaos magick. This is just the way it works for me. Feel free to change any of it to suit your personal needs. 

1. Find a place where you won’t be interrupted for a while, preferably a nice, quiet dark room.

2. With your back to a wall, close your eyes (closing your eyes is not always necessary, depending on your goal) and stand on your toes. Lock your arms behind your back with your hands interlocked together. Arch your back and extend your neck as far as you can. 3. Your breathing will become/should become more labored and faster, bordering on hyperventilating. You’ll also start to feel tingly and exhausted. It will feel intense, so be prepared. 4. You will begin to feel incredibly uncomfortable, start hyperventilating, and your vision (if you keep your eyes open) will begin to blur, but stay locked in this pose for as long as it is possible. 

5. Right before you collapse from the strain, you will enter a kind of altered mental state. At this point, you may feel like your floating, or like your muscles are on fire. While in this state, it will be possible to do certain acts of visualization. This is also when sigils can be charged, or an affirmation can be said. 6. Collapse to the floor and relax. Hopefully, you didn’t blackout, but it is possible. You will probably feel fairly strange but this is normal. Do whatever banishing ritual you feel necessary (I usually go with a laughter banishing, but it doesn’t really matter as long as it works for you) and then get up slowly so you don’t accidentally fall over and crack your head open.

So why the hell would you want to do this? It sounds pretty awful.

Well, yeah. It kind of is awful. That’s the point. I initially said that death posture was a kind of meditation, which is true in a sense. Claudio Naranjo once said:

“The word ‘meditation’ has been used to designate a variety of practices that differ enough from one another so that we may find trouble in defining what meditation is.“ 

Death posture exemplifies this, as it is meditation, just not in the sense of what we typically imagine meditation being. Like any form of meditation, the primary goal is to attain a state of gnosis (something I will cover more in depth in a later WTF is article), but in attaining this gnostic state, you then use it for a work, whether a sigil, spell, or whatever.

But wait, how do I use a mental state for spellcraft/sigil craft?

You’ll hear me often say this, echoing a bit from bluefluke‘s Psychonaut field manual, but visualization, visualization, visualization. You’ll need to hold the image of what your are trying to accomplish in your mind’s eye when the gnostic state is entered (and preferably for the entire duration of the instance of death posture.) I’ll cover different visualization techniques in a later article.

Thanks to enochtopus for suggesting I talk about this. I think I’ll do sigil magick next, then move on to gnosis and visualization.

23

天津甕星

kulning (old swedish herding call) for a herd of cows.

Skipped straight from Maiden to Crone like nobody’s business 

You can add pockets.

You can add pockets to anything with a side seam.

They can be big pockets.

Anything we want can have big pockets.

We have unlimited power. Over the side seam pockets.

There’s two steps: drafting the pattern and sewing the pattern. The pattern drafting is really quite easy:

I’m having trouble getting google drive to give me my pictures, so I traced over the foundation lines.

The first thing to make is the pocket template. 

Draw a 10″ vertical line on your drafting paper.

Measure 1″ down from the top of the line, and draw a notch. This is notch #1.

Measure 6″ from the top of the paper, and mark it “x”

Measure 1″ down from X (7″ from top) and make a little mark to come back to later.

Measure 3″ down from that mark (4″ from x, 10″ from top) and you should be at the end of your line.

You have now drawn your vertical foundation line.

Draw a 3.5″ long horizontal line at the very top of the vertical line

Draw a 5″ long horizontal line that comes off the point you marked X.

Draw a 5″ long horizontal line that comes off the very bottom of the vertical line.

You should now have all the photoshopped in lines in my image, your foundation lines, on your paper.

You sort of eyeball in the curved lines. Starting at the mark you made to come back to later (7″ from the top of the line), draw in your pocket bottom. It’s just a little swoop that eventually touches the bottom foundation line. You also need to draw in the curve at the top of the pocket, to connect it to the middle horizontal line.

The good news is that if your foundation lines are right, you can go pretty nuts with eyeballing in the curves and still be in the right place. If the drafting was tough and you’re more a go with the flow kind of patterner, just look at my pattern and guess how you’ll want yours.

Make sure that you can see your notches at 1″ and 6″ from the top. You’ll need them.

Now you have your pocket template, and you need to turn it into three pattern pieces.

The first pattern piece is for the pocket front, and it’s very easy. Take your template, trace it onto a new piece of paper, and add 1/2″ of seam allowance on all sides. Make sure you transfer your notches.

(Sorry for that +/- thing there. I’m having trouble with google drive and I’m way too lazy to try to troubleshoot it when I could just take sloppy screenshots)

For the pocket back, trace your template onto a new piece of paper. Measure a vertical line in 1″ from your vertical foundation line. Erase the part to the left of that line, leaving you with a sort of slimmed down version of your front pocket piece. Add seam allowance all the way around.

Now you’re going to do the same thing you did with the pocket front, but keeping the smaller part. This is the pocket back.

So, trace your pocket template again, draw a line in 1″ from the vertical line, and then erase everything that’s to the right of the line. Then, add seam allowance along all the sides except the notched one. I drew over it in green hilighter so that you can tell which one. This is the skirt side seam extension.

Pattern drafting is done.

So, what’s with the funky flap? Effectively, what we have right now is a pocket front that’s made of one piece of fabric, and the same shape for the back that’s made of two different pieces of fabric. You’re going to add the skirt side seam extension to your skirt, and then sew the pocket back to this. This is going to hide your pocket opening.

This is going to make your pocket much less visible. This is important, because you will likely be making your pocket out of a different fabric than your finished skirt. If you made your skirt out of something expensive, especially custom-printed, it’d be a massive waste of money to use that fabric inside the pocket, where no one can see it. If you’re using a looser-woven fabric, like I did for this skirt, you need to make your pocket in something much tighter, smoother, and less likely to form holes. Quilt cotton is great for this sort of thing because it’s tightly woven and smooth.

Take the pattern for the back of your skirt, and tape the pattern for the side seam extension at the top of the side seam.

If you’re like me, and don’t use a pattern for your skirt, pin the extension on the side seam and then trim the side seam down everywhere else (just cut around the extension piece). For 99% of lolita skirts where you don’t use a pattern, losing 1″ on each side seam isn’t going to affect the overall poof.

Side note, I did this on a pleated skirt and pleated the fabric first. In a normal situation, you would do this with the fabric flat, and gather the waistband after the pockets are assembled.

Cut your pockets out of your pocket material. Yes, I was a terrible person and did one on the lengthwise grain and one on the crosswise grain. It’ll be fine.

Make sure that your notches are visible on both pocket pieces.

Now, line the top of your pocket front up with the top of your skirt, and sew your pocket along the horizontal seam. (if your pocket has a RS or WS, sew the pocket to the skirt front with right sides together). If you’re feeling like getting a gold star, press, grade, and understitch the seam.

Line the top of your pocket back up with the top of your skirt extension, and sew the pocket back to the skirt seam extension. Gold star for pressing, grading the seam allowance, and understitching the seam.

So, with two gold stars in hand, put the front and backs of the skirts together, right sides together, with the pockets sticking out.

Remember your bottom notch at the 6″ mark? Stick a pin there. You’re now going to sew from that pin all the way to the bottom of the skirt.

This might feel wrong at first, because it feels like you’re sewing the bottom inch or so of your pocket all the way closed. This a normal feeling, and you’re experiencing it because I just told you to sew part of your pocket all the way shut. The opening for your hand has to be shorter that the total length of the pocket, or else you won’t be able to put stuff in it without it falling out.

This will be roughly where the thicker pink line is.

Once you’ve sewn your side seam (leaving the pocket open, obviously), then you’re going to want to sew the pocket bag together. This is the purple line in my photo up there.

You might notice that my pocket sewing is a lot shorter than the pocket fabric. I sewed my pocket back piece on incorrectly and had to shorten the pocket or else it’d make a hole. Pockets are cool like that. If they’re a little off, no one but you will ever know.

I then did some extra reinforcing (did an extra seam around the outside of my stitching, and did a bit of extra machine tacking at the bottom of the pocket opening to make sure there weren’t rips developing in the future with wear.

So, then you can flip the skirt right side out and appreciate how nice your pocket is. There’s just one more thing:

When you put the waistband in, you’re going to need to take the top of the pocket bag (that little 3.5″ bit at the very top) and sew that into your waistband. As you sew your waistband, this will actually be pretty obvious that it needs to be done, because the waistband intersects with the pocket top. If this was a normal skirt, I’d say to do it now.

However, since this is lolita, you’re probably going to need to gather or pleat your skirt, and THEN sew the pocket top down. It’s just one more step: pull your gathers, get them to look pretty, and then run a line of basting to hold the pocket nice and neat along the top line.  You don’t want to get the top of the pocket caught up in pleats or gathers, or you’ll have weird wrinkles in your pockets that hold lots of crumbs and feel gritty.  Obviously this is the picture that I can’t get google docs to let me see, so if that’s confusing, bug me about it tomorrow and I’ll get that good picture up.

Here, you can see my pins holding the pocket top flat, and you might be able to see my line of basting that holds it in place. Once that basting is there, you can attach your waistband just like normal, and then you’ll have a pocket big enough to hold your smartphone and also some gum.

One last note: if you put really heavy things in your new pocket, make sure your petticoat can support the weight. There’s nothing that says that you can’t build a lolita skirt with pockets, but the laws of physics sometimes say what you can and can’t put in them without wrecking your poof.

Anyway, there we go, the MOST requested lolita tutorial I’ve ever gotten. My brain’s feeling a bit fuzzy and I’m sure I said something weird or that doesn’t make sense, but my askbox is open and I read every comment someone puts on a reblog, so feel free to tell me to clarify.

Scotland is not boring

Candle Magic Omens

If you are doing candle magic, watch for omens that may predict the success of your spell:

Tall, strong flame - your spell is empowered and getting through, it will work very well

Flickering, unsteady flame - your spell is having trouble manifesting your results

Dancing, wild flame - get ready for the roller coaster ride

Normal flame - things are working as expected

Small, blue flame - your spell is not getting through, prepare a backup plan

Crackling, popping flame - your spell may manifest in very unexpected ways

- Tho

Kind of gives you chills .