#its gonna be just as shitty if i decide to go retail i gotta deal w customeer service either way

[cs-eg]

its actually okay 2 not get ppl expensive things 4 Christmas if u literally just do not have money its actually okay 2 not get ppl expensive things 4 Christmas if u literally just do not have money its actually okay 2 not get ppl expensive things 4 Christmas if u literally just do not have money

[a-magpie-witchling]

WOOT BROKE W(b)ITCH HAUL

HEY YOU

YES YOU

ARE YOU BROKE BUT STILL WANNA PULL THE THREADS OF THE ETHER AND DEFY THE ESTABLISHED LAWS OF MAN INVOKING THE ANCIENT MAGICK?

GOOD.

You and I are gonna go S H O P P I N G

But, Semiramis! I just told you I’m broke! I can’t get nice things!

*smack*

WRONG.

The world is full of wonders, one of them being

DOLLAR STORES

Remember sweeties, a witch’s best friend is scavenging.

Open your eyes. Look around. Scout your neighborhood.

But what about the things that I can’t get out on the streets!?

That’s what we’re shopping for!

Now before we move on, close your eyes… then open them again because you need to read the rest of the message… and repeat the following mantra:

THE CRAFT REQUIRES NOTHING. THE CRAFT REQUIRES NOTHING. THE CRAFT REQUIRES NOTHING BUT MYSELF.

No fancy ingredients, no pretty crystals, no expensive incenses will work better than your RAW HEART AND SOUL.

Mkay?

Now let’s go get some of that good shit.

How good?

Diz gud.

Now, it’s no mystery that a broke ass witch needs to pay a visit to the local dollar stores to get her materials every once in a while, but if you’re like me and live in a place where there are no dollar stores (and there are no dollars either) WHERE TO GO?

The answer is here:

CHINESE IMPORT STORES ARE YOUR NEW SANCTUARY.

These places are AWESOME for a witch on a budget, because they carry EVERYTHING. From toys to art supplies to kitchenware…

AND SPIRITUALITY SUPPLIES.

(That’s where we come in)

Speaking of budget, by the way. Let’s set one.

Say… $15?

FIFTEEN AMERICAN DOLLARS. I will take you home with some nice and rare goodies that will spice up your spells.

Let’s go in.

Oooh what a promising start. This here, my friends, are 25 grams of the purest coke Palo Santo wood. Don’t like it in its natural state?

They have it in incense too!

But we ain’t getting that shit. I’m allergic so I can’t burn anything scented or else I… die.

But know they’re there, as well as essential oils, and they’re quite accessi-

WHAT!?

28 BUCKS FOR A BOTTLE OF ESSENTIAL OIL!?

AIN’T NOBODY GOT CASH FO DAT

Nah I’m just kidding. This is the price in pesos, meaning that these oils are *math happens* $1.55 each!

What a D E A L

BUT THAT’S NOT WHAT WE’RE HERE FOR BECAUSE I’M SOON TEACHING YOU HOW TO MAKE YOUR OWN OILS.

Also, holy shit…

You HAVE to see the candles aisle in this place.

They have them twirly

Large

Larger

The photo is not blury, you’re drunk

Scented

Scentless

Birthdayful

Oh hellooo thereee~

Twelve candles for $1.94 you say?

Meaning SIXTEEN CENTS A CANDLE?

Adopted.

Don’t let anyone tell you cheap candles don’t get the job done, people!

Plus they burn just as good.

NOW at this point the store was 10 minutes away from closing time, so I had to stop taking pictures to get my ass outta there, BUT

Here’s a look at what we got:

That doesn’t look too good, let’s add a F I L T E R

Those little crochet doilies that will serve as my new altar tablecloths? They were $0.55

But Amis! Those don’t look too witchy, more like what my grandma puts under her vases!

First of all, how dare you.

Second of all, how dare you.

Granmotherly stuff is witchy by D E F I N I T I O N. Embrace the grandma aesthetic, y’all!

Also:

If you’re poor you have to be CRAFTY. Look at that! It has a pentacle now. How long did it take? Literally 30 seconds! Imagine what we could do with a whole afternoon!

Ok, I admit it, that was a fiasco, BUT WE’RE ONTO SOMETHING THERE.

Let’s take a closer look at what else we brought, shall we?

This tiny chest is 7.5 cm wide x 5.5 cm tall x 5.5 cm deep (3 in x 2.1 in x 2.1 in) and will hold my pocket altar. It was *drum roll* $1.70!

I was getting tired of using my mom’s big ass scissors to cut my tiny delicate herbs, so I got myself this pair of snips! Price: $0.55 and they’re sharper than Tom Hiddleston’s style. Plus they serve a multitude of purposes, like shanking a bitch.

A quick stop by the crystal shop that was also closing (pfft crystal shop. Sounds like out of a fantasy novel, love it) yields the following goodies:

-Onyx ($0.55)

-Fluorite ($0.27)

-Snowflake obsidian (hard to get where I live. It’s kinda pricey at $2.20. I recommend other kinds of obsidian or maybe just black glass as I’ve been using until today, it still works awesomely. I got the obsidian because I wanted to experiment with it and my Mentor recommended me to get it, same as the fluorite).

-And the CUTEST little quartz formation. This one kinda defeats the purpose because it was a bit pricey. You don’t need it; any clear quartz will work the same.  It was $4.50 and it was my guilty pleasure of the month. It also came with a free satchel that’s most certainly going to be used with magickal results in the foreseeable future.

More of it because it’s so gorgeous ♥

Back to the fluorite! That shit is large and cheap! Well, you see, it’s kinda ugly because I was part of a larger stone and broke down the middle when they were trying to perforate it to make it into a pendant.

But check this hot babe out

W O R K I T

Coming back from the imports store, I paid a visit to my pot dealer erh I mean my herbs supplier. Got myself some ginger for $0.27

AND THEN

I SAW IT

Maybe they don’t package it like this in your country, but here this little shitty capsule is worth its weight in GOLD.

Y’all know what this is?

This is SAFFRON.

Now normally I steer fucking clear of things this expensive, but when I asked my dealer I mean the vendor she said it was on sale.

This stuff LITERALLY sold by FRACTIONS OF GRAMS. In this case that’s 0.2 grams of saffron, that’s 0.007 ounces. YES. ZERO POINT ZERO ZERO SEVEN. Insert here Bond reference

Retail price? Normally around $8 per capsule (EIGHT AMERICAN DOLLARS!)

How much on sale?

TWO DOLLARS.

A tip for the broke witch: hunt down for sales. Even if you don’t use the ingredients in your spells, you can still trade them with other witches or with anyone, really.

After this I went home and decided to try out my new candles.

And as I said, if you’re poor, you gotta get crafty!

I cut one of the candles in half. A part went to my pocket altar, and the other half…

I used one of those ceramic saucers with the little erh… lower level circle in the middle?

USE CERAMIC. THIS IS IMPORTANT. IT RESISTS TEMPERATURE WELL AND YOU’RE GONNA NEED IT.

Melt the wax in the microwave or on the flame and then make sure it stays in the center of the saucer. Then take it out and wait until it cools down (or put it in the freezer if you are an impatient little shit). DO NOT LET IT SOLIDIFY COMPLETELY.

Then you take it out and use a round cookie cutter (or if you’re a cheap ass like me, find something else)

I just used the styling nozzle of my hair drying because F U K D A P O L I C E

Put it again in the freezer and once it’s completely solidified use a spatula because you, my dear witch

Just made yourself a moon wax amulet!

Engrave it with your sigils, place it on your altar, carefully soften the bottom with heat and use it as a seal, the possibilities are endless!

BUT WAIT, WHAT ABOUT THE REMNANTS!?

EVIL EYE WARD!

The rest? Melt it again or use it as a poppet in case you wanna cast a spell over an onion ring…

By the end of the day, our haul is:

-Altar cloth $0.55

-Herbs snips $0.55

-Mini-altar wooden box $1.70

-Dozen of blue candles $1.94

-Ginger root $0.27

-Satchel $0

-Snowflake obsidian $2.20

-Fluorite$ 0.27

-Onix $0.55

-Quartz crystal formation $4.50

-Saffron Capsule $2

A grand total of $14.53!

Of our budget of $15 we still have $0.47 that where I live is enough for the bus ride back home!

If we take away the unnecessarily pricey stuff (the quartz and the saffron) we got everything for $8.03!

Now if THAT’S not magick, I don’t know what is!

 SOME FINAL TIPS!

1)      REUSE as many things as you can.

2)      MOVE THOSE FEET. I know it doesn’t sound appealing, but CHECK SEVERAL PLACES. Find the best prices by checking different stores and comparing.

3)      BE CREATIVE. If you find yourself in need of something you can’t afford, think and find a way to replace it or get it through other routes. As I said, witch trading is a thing!

4)      BARGAIN. There’s no shame in it, people! If you’re dealing with independent merchants and buy regularly/are buying a lot, try to get better prices! Don’t disrespect their business, though!

5)      REMEMBER YOUR MANTRA. Witchcraft requires NOTHING. Except you.

 Now go out there and work your Magick!

-Semiramis, the Magpie Witchling

[greenishbucket]

We’ll Find a Way to Survive

Lardo and graduation. 1.8k, ao3.

Inspired by @jack-manpain-zimmermann‘s post about Lardo graduating. Hope it was okay to do this! 

It’s a Thursday evening and Lardo is sitting with her legs on her desk, a bowl of tomato rice in her lap that’s been in the fridge for at least four days and is starting to taste kinda funky, wrapped in a hoodie even though it’s warm because whatever. It feels comforting to be wrapped up. She has three texts from her mom and two from her dad that she’s been ignoring for three days, even though they’re just sweet updates on life at home.

Shitty is talking fast on Skype about some asshole in his class. Lardo’s pretty sure it’s the same dick that comes up every week when Shitty has a two-hour class with the dude but he really is a dick so she lets Shitty get it all out even when he’s recycling the same criticisms again. He still looks grey around the eyes and she can see three coffee cups from different stores on his bedside table. His hair needs washing and it’s pretty fucking ridiculous but Lardo can’t look away from how the greasy look falls differently now Shitty hasn’t got a flow.

When Lardo had first cut Shitty’s hair it had been funny at first, chilling in the bathroom while Shitty had showered then brushing his hair out with a comb and hacking it into all the ugliest styles she could think of with threats to leave it like that. He’d laughed and said hockey players were, like, contractually obliged to have ugly as fuck haircuts so she’d better pull through on that.

Neither of them had given voice to the fact Shitty wasn’t going to be a hockey player anymore but they had fallen quiet as Lardo carried on cutting his hair into a respectable attempt at what he’d called a ‘neutral upstanding lawyer bro-do’. When she was done they’d looked in the bathroom mirror, Lardo on a stool for height and her head head poking out over Shitty’s shoulder, and Shitty’s mouth had been shut tight like he didn’t trust himself to speak, his eyes a little watery.

Lardo had wanted to kiss the top of his head, or something, but they weren’t like that yet. Or they were because what was personal space even but Lardo didn’t know if she could do it like they were still just bros, felt like maybe it would come across too heavy. Shitty had barely even looked like himself without the flow, the back and sides of his neck paler and vulnerable looking where they hadn’t seen steady sun in years. It was too much and Lardo hadn’t wanted to start crying about shit so she’d given him a noogie instead and then called him a nerd and the moment had broken.

Now all the feeling about his flow comes rushing back. Graduation is right around the corner and Lardo has literally fuck all planned and she’s fucked it all up and her parents are breathing down her neck about how she hasn’t got a job as a doctor or some shit lined up for after Samwell even though she’s an art major and she misses having Shitty here in the Haus with her to talk some gender shit and smoke with her in the reading room when the stress was too much. Now they’re all growing up and having to move out and on and Shitty won’t be able to grow his flow back for years if ever and Lardo is fucking dreading the end of the year so much because literally what is she going to do?

She’s halfway through a mouthful of tomato rice and Shitty is still ranting about the asshole dude when she realises her throat is almost too tight to swallow and, jeez, she’s actually crying.

“Dude, Lards – are you crying?”

“No,” Lardo says with as much force as she can while crying and talking around a half-chewed bowl of tomato rice. She spits it back into the bowl which is gross but whatever, it tasted weird already and it’s not like she’s sharing the rice with anyone else.

Shitty kindly ignores the rice spitting. “Hey, talk to me, bro. What’s going on?”

“Nothing.”

A sigh. “Lards.”

“Nothing.”

“Lardo, come on.”

“Shits, it’s nothing you can fucking fix, okay? Leave it.”

“For fuck’s sake, I’m not saying let me fix all your problems,” Shitty says, looking if anything more tired and that’s the last thing Lardo wanted. “I’m saying talk to me, let all that negative shit out. Bawling in the middle of me sharing the latest horrors of law school is pretty fucking standard but dude’s been worse and you haven’t started the waterworks so I’m thinking it’s not the current and future state of our legal system that’s got you crying, not that I’d judge you if it was.”

Lardo pushes through the shit-ton of crap that’s been building on her desk for weeks in search of a tissue then wipes her eyes and messily blows her nose when she finds a vaguely clean one. She doesn’t feel better really but the short burst of crying has taken some of the pressure off, reduced the stress to kinda-manageable instead of holy-fuck-what-do-I-do. She takes a long gulp of her water before she starts to talk.

“It’s just like, all this graduation shit that I really don’t wanna deal with. I have no idea what I’m doing and me and Rans used to be, like, bros in that but now even he’s sorted and I’m still not and all the other art kids have had plans since day one because apparently that’s what you’ve gotta have if you get a degree in art and no one told me. I don’t know where I’m supposed to live except move back to my parents which would be fine because I’d be nearer you and they’re my parents, y’know, but they’re all ‘Larissa, we just want what’s best for you but also you gotta do this exact thing that we decided was best’ and ‘Larissa, your art is so interesting but how are you gonna move forward with it’ and like– fuck.”

Lardo’s heart is beating hard against her ribs and her hands are shaking with the adrenaline of letting it all out. She wipes her eyes again and continues, unable to look at the screen but before she can overthink it: “I just miss getting to hang out with you every day and now I won’t even have these guys to hang out with anymore and it’s all gonna suck and I hate it.”

Her room still feels lonely and cold even as the sounds of the Haus carry on all around but it’s a little less than before and Lardo’s chest feels a lot lighter. She scoops up some of her saliva-tomato-rice and shoves it in her mouth, still keeping her eyes on the floorboards.

“Bro,” Shitty says after a moment. When she looks up, his eyebrows are reaching his hairline. “Like, Lards.”

“I know, it’s all my fault because I should’ve organised better but you get why it sucks, right?”

Shitty makes a spluttering noise and says, “Fucking hell, no way. It’s not your fault art is undervalued by capitalist society and you’ve got parents with expectations and shit, I’m saying holy shit, man, you do not need to be getting so tied up with this and if you are you gotta let someone know before you’re choking on your tomato rice.”

“But there’s like a bazillion things I need to sort and I don’t even know how to do any of it,” Lardo says. “Like, how do I just make myself have direction in life and shit?”

Shitty’s leaning in close to the camera, tucked with his knees up on his desk chair and laptop balancing on top judging by the way its shaking every now and again, and Lardo wishes she’d thought ahead to keep this meltdown until they’d been together in person. Talking over Skype is still better than phoning but – not to be a baby – Lardo could do with a hug.

“You gotta just go with the flow, at least half the people graduating don’t know what they’re doing.”

“That’s your advice? Chill? Are you Nursey?”

“Hand on heart, swear to fuck, the dude’s onto something with that one. Why panic?”

Lardo can feel herself getting irritated and she hates that her fuse is so short these days but what does Shitty know about trying to figure out graduation, he got into fucking Harvard Law and his mom is a like a hippie or something and is all about self-actualisation and shit.

“I have no time to figure out all my shit and jobs are already getting back to people and I’ve wasted a fuck-ton of money on a degree I don’t know what to do with,” she says, carefully steady.

“And you’ve got your whole life to figure something out, bro. Graduating is sad and scary as fuck but, let me tell you, it feels amazing. The ‘swawesomest thing to ever happen.”

Lardo sighs. “I know, Shits. I just wanna know what I’m doing.”

Shitty puts the laptop back on his desk, shifts awkwardly in his chair. “Well, yanno. If you wanted you could come split rent with me while you work shit out. Your parents would probably be cool with it and you’re probs overqualified for all the retail jobs and whatever you could get. You could look into grad school shit, too.”

Lardo feels herself tearing up again. “Shits.”

Shitty shrugs like he hasn’t probably thought it over for months and mumbles, “Only if you wanna, man. It’d be pretty fucking great to have you.”

“Shut up, I’d be coming for that crazy good BU painting and sculpture MFA program,” Lardo says, meaning yes yes yes please and thank you.

“Got your back, bro,” Shitty says, meaning love you.

They grin stupidly at each other for a bit over the pixelated screen. Lardo’s still wrapped up in a hoodie, spit-filled decaying rice for dinner, head pulsing with crying and her face itchy with tears and it’s all still unclear as fuck but at least there’s something now. The beginnings of a plan. Lardo still can’t believe sometimes that she really gets to date her best friend, they’re really doing this and it’s as good as she’d ever hoped. It seems stupid now to think she had to go this alone, when Shitty’s sitting with her after a long as fuck day and giving her a reality check.

“God, I wish we could make out now,” she says because sure, romance, but God she wishes they could make out now.

“Oh fuck, me too,” Shitty says, expression still concerned and she knows he’s probs going to be carrying some guilt about not noticing she was feeling bad and he’ll crack the closer to deadlines they get but she’ll have his back too when it all gets too much for him. “When are you visiting again?” he asks.

Lardo pulls out her calendar from her desk of crap and for once the circled graduation day, still some rows down, doesn’t make her feel quite as much tight, sucking anxiety. Her and Shits compare their schedules and she breathes easy.