The Shop: Book of Shadows

I have mentioned in several previous posts that I own a shop, specifically a metaphysical bookstore. It is called Book of Shadows. Although not a craft project in the strictest sense, it is one of my creations (at least as much as the garden was). And since I seem to mention it fairly frequently, I thought you, the reader, might like to see it. So here it is, inside and out.

This first pic is an older one. It features the original marquee sign. Below, are pics with the new marque sign (and when I say new, I mean about four years old). For some reason, I never seem to take pics of things until after they are old and faded. Both signs were hand lettered and painted by myself.

All these pictures are from our current location (1100 Clarendon SW Canton, OH), where we have been for the last 12 years. For two years before that, we were at two other locations elsewhere in town, but I have no pictures of those locations.

The pentagram on the side of the building was really beautiful when it was first put up (2003). It was back-lit with white christmas tree lights at night. The lights and ivy are all gone now. They got too old and tattered. This past summer I gave it a fresh coat of white paint, so now it doesn't have gold trim around the edges either. Maybe in the spring I will restore it to its former glory.

Interesting story; This is actually the second pentagram sign to be hung. The first one was only up about a month before someone decided to tear it down. They came in the night with a cordless drill, pulled out all 13 four inch long mounting screws to take it down, smashed it into three pieces, and threw the pieces through my front window. Wasn't that nice of them? Oh, yeah, they left a hate note in the mail box too.


And now we go inside.

The front counter.

The herb jars and knife case.

The candles.

The book shelves.

The view from the front door.

The public altar.

As I mentioned before, this is where I do most of my creating. Through that black curtain, to the right of the altar, is my workroom. Maybe I'll post some pics of it in the future, but right now it's really messy.

One last odd fact about my shop; it seems to have some kind of mystical cloaking field around it. Several times a week we get people complaining about how hard it is to find the store. Some of them call us from their cars asking for directions. Many tell us that they drove by it three or four times before they found it. I've always thought that was very odd. We are in a mostly residential neighborhood, with only on street parking, and the road we are on is not a main drag, but it gets a lot of traffic. We are on the corner. There is a stop light at our corner. The building is 60 feet long and bright yellow (on the side). We have a 4ft. high and 16ft. long sign on the marquee. There is a 4ft. diameter bright white pentagram on the side of the building. How is that hard to spot?

Enough with the Pens Already!

OK, this will be my last post of pens for a little bit, unless I come up with something truly unique. But I have been cranking them out at a pretty good pace. This first one is one of three I have in this line. It is unlike the others I have made so far. It was also much more difficult to make than the others. It has three coats of black lacquer on it, and the skull is cast resin. Wrapping the grip in wire was a little rough on the hand, and difficult to affix without messing up the lacquer.

These others are variations on a theme. Once I find a design that works well, I tend to run it into the ground. The first two are very similar to one posted previously, but have a satin cord wrapped grip.





OK, that should do me for a while. I'll be making some more, but I'll try to hold them for future posts. We need to pace ourselves. Don't want to OD on pens.

More Pen Madness

Yesterday, I spent another $70 at the craft store buying supplies to make more of these quill pens I've been working on. That brings the total investment into the pen and ink fiasco to something like $200. On the plus side, the creative juices are starting to flow, and I have been turning our some fairly decent items, IMHO. Here are four new pens that I finished last night.





I'm thinking of putting them up on Etsy.com for sale, but I'm not sure yet how I would ship them. So far, in my shop, I have sold two bottles of ink and one pen. Another 30 or so pieces, and I should break even.

Not Quite Stained Glass

My shop (Book of Shadows: Supernatural Gifts, 1100 Clarendon SW Canton, OH 44710) is where I spend a lot of my time. It is where I create most of my art. I also use that creative skill, from time to time, to spruce up the place. I am by no means a great decorator. In fact, most of the best decorative ideas I have incorporated into the shop have been stolen from what I have seen other people do. I have no shame about this, as before I started checking out other people's design ideas and appropriating them, my shop looked like a metaphysical hardware store. Besides, someone once said, "Good artists borrow. Great artists steal."

Not that any of these design elements were either borrowed, or stolen. They are actually some of my few original ideas. The picture above is of my hand made "Open" sign. It was made with that paint that looks like stained glass when it dries. The face plate is a piece of Plexiglas that has been set into a wooden frame. I ran a router down the length of a piece of 1x2 to create a groove for the plexi to sit in. The back panel is a piece of white tile board that has been covered with aluminum foil to help reflect the maximum amount of light back towards the front panel for higher visibility during the day. Tucked away on the side edges, sandwiched between the front and back panels, are two small fluorescent lights that light it at night. The design was first drawn on paper in a 1:1 scale in pencil. Then the plexi was laid over top of it, and the paint was applied using the drawing as a template. The colors were much more vibrant of course. The sign is several years old now and has been exposed to a lot of UV rays. You can see where the red is starting to wash out in places.

Years ago, when the shop first opened, I did a similar sign for the front window. It was much larger and depicted the store's name and a large pentagram. It has not weathered time well. It is very badly faded, even after having been recolored at least once, and now has a large piece broken off in the corner. This pic was taken from inside looking out. It looks even crappier now. It has been out of service for years..

I've always loved the look of stained glass. These pictures are of the ceiling lights inside the shop. The store's interior was very bright, and the white light from the florescent light fixtures seemed harsh. I wanted to warm it up a bit with some color, so I decided to transform the lighting fixtures into stained glass "skylights".

These were actually very easy to make. I pulled down the clear plastic covers from the light fixtures. One side of these plastic lenses is bumpy, to refract the light, and the other side is smooth. I made sure that the smooth side was on the side facing the light bulbs. Then I laid out a pattern on the smooth side using black electrical tape. You have to make sure that you don't stretch the tape as you pull it off the roll, or it will shrink up on you over time and distort the design.

Then I took colored cellophane and cut it to size to fill in the panels. I secured these in place around the edges with clear cellophane tape. It's actually a rather rickety affair when you see it up close, but since you never see it up close on that side, unless you are changing the light bulbs, it doesn't matter. The effect is remarkable. Of course these lights are many years old now too, so there has been considerable fading. You can hardly tell that there were green and purple and yellow panels in them at one time. Some of them are really starting to show their age, and badly need redone. I'm just too lazy.

The Pen is Mighty

So, a couple of weeks ago, I'm surfing around on eBay, itching to buy something, and I get this bizarre notion in my head that I want to buy some fountain pen nibs. I don't know why, I just did. I have many fetishes (such as the tiny padlock fetish mentioned earlier), and one of them is office supplies. I've had a fascination with quill pens since I was very young. I bought my first feather quill when I was about 6 or 7 at the William McKinley Presidential Library & Museum. In the 80's and 90's I used to write letters to friends with a calligraphy pen.

So again, I'm on eBay, looking at pen nibs, and I find several auctions that I like. I bid on 5 of them (why I needed that many I don't know). I didn't expect to win all of them, but when I only won two (which sound have been plenty), I some how became incensed and determined that I must have more. As I mentioned in several older posts (remember the tiny locks?), when I get a hankering and make an impulse buy of some small trinket that I desperately want, I tend to buy a lot of them. I mean, a lot of them. So I went back on eBay to look for more, and I found a great little offering from Australia selling antique, new in box, post office pen nibs from England in gross boxes. It was all I could do to resist buying more than two boxes. Why I would ever need more than 288 pen nibs of the same size, is beyond comprehension. But I bought them. They are pictured above, along with one of a set of a dozen from another auction (lower left).

So, what to do with them, but make pens! I couldn't find any good deals on pen holders (the handles), so I decided to make some for myself. In the past I have taken turkey feathers from the craft store and cut them to make quill pens and sold them at my store for spell writing. They sell rather well, but they write for crap. I figured that a cheap and simple solution would be to glue the new pen nibs right to the tip of the feather and then wrap the joint for aesthetic purposes, and voilà, a good quality stylish writing instrument that was cheap and easy to make.

I used 5 minute epoxy to set the nibs in place, and then wrapped them with a leather cord, which I affixed with super glue. I also stripped some of the feather back to make a longer handle. Otherwise, the feather tends to get in the way of your hand when writing. I only had black and white feathers, but I intend to make some other colors when I get the chance. Ironically, about two days after I made these, I found a seller on eBay that was making the exact same thing. They even looked to be using the same type of nib and even wrapping them in the same type of leather cord. Weird. They are charging like $12+shipping each for theirs. I am only charging $7 each for mine in my store.

The first pen I made was actually a wooden handled one. It took me about an hour, maybe a little more, to make. I carved out a spot on the tip of a wooden dowel so the nib would sit flush. Then I did some tapering to the ends. It took me a little bit to decide how to decorate it, but I decided on engraving the handle with a motto, written in Theban script, and spiraling up the handle. It says "power of the word". Sort of a nod to that whole "the Universe was created with a word" thing. I used a piece of tape and wrapped it in a spiral around the shaft and marked along one edge with a pencil to get my baseline. Then I penciled in the letters. I had to redo this step three times. The first time, the spiral was going the other way, and the letters didn't want to lean that direction. It looked awkward. The second time I wrote "The power of the word", but found I didn't have enough room, so I truncated the first article. The third time it worked perfectly. Next I used a Dremel with a tiny tiny engraving bur to carve out the letters. Then I sanded and stained it with a mahogany stain and gave it two coats of polyurethane. I was content to leave it like that, but a few days later I decided to wrap the joint like I did with the feather quills. I'm still not sure which way I like it better.

So, all told, I now have around 350 quill pen nibs in about three different styles (not including my own personal collection of around 30 different speedball nibs for calligraphy). And of course it didn't stop there. Once I had nibs on the way, I decided I would have to make pens to sell in the store, and I can't sell pens without ink, so I had to go shopping for ink. I bought a 32oz. bottle of black india ink that I could repackage. But, of course that meant I would need bottles to repackage the ink. I searched around and the best deal I could find was on eBay for a lot of 288 bottles (WAY more than I needed), which cost me just over $60 with shipping. The bottles are the perfect shape and size for ink, but have ugly caps. I am experimenting with painting the lids and adding an appliqué.

Between the ink, the bottles, and the three different purchases of nibs, I've got about $130 invested into this little brain fart. I'll have to sell at least 30 pieces to cover my costs. That aught to teach me to impulse buy. Not.

Azathoth Box (WIP) part 1

Most of my projects seem to take forever to come to completion, partly because I work on up to 20 different things at once, but mostly because I'm lazy and get bored easily. I don't like to work with any sense of urgency. It hampers my creative process. This box has been slowly finding its way for the last few months. It was designed to be similar in style to another box I did a few years ago, but I don't think I want to do that same item again with this. I'm still looking for a new direction to take it.

These first two pictures are of the build process. The box was one of those pre-fab craft store things, but a nice one. I look for ones that have character to their shape, or that have physical features that are suitable for a particular purpose. I liked this one because it had a flat top, with slightly rounded edges, and thick walls suitable for carving into. I laid out my design in pencil, then carved it in with a dremel tool. I used a conical stone bit meant for grinding and polishing rather than a steel bur, because it sands the groove as it cuts and leaves a smoother channel. This is soft wood, and it tends to splinter and leave rough edges with a bur.

The glyphs I used were chosen for their aesthetic value and have no mystical significance. The bottom row of glyphs on the front and back were taken from some of my favorite fonts, as were the four corners on the top. The center top emblem is my typical eye and tentacles (Eye of Azathoth) with a sun or star-like motif thrown in.

The top row of glyphs, that runs all the way around the box, were modeled after Rosicrucian "name" seals, where the name of an entity, usually an angel or demon, is traced out on a rose cross with letters arranged on it. The pattern created by tracing from one letter to the next in the entity's name becomes a symbol for its name. The symbols on the box are only patterned to look like "name" symbols, they have no meaning.

Inside the box is the sigil of Abn-Sur. It is a glyph of my own creation that harks back to my Stone Elder Sign disks and the mythos elements I created in my Book of Ioz. I was going to put an elder sign on the inside of the lid, but I got impatient and decided not to. I probably should have. It is the only surface that doesn't have a carving. Maybe I'll put something else there, some sort of appliqué, if I can think of something cool.

The glyph on the bottom of the box is another one of my own creations. I pulled it from my Necronomicon Pages.

I set these "name" glyphs to straddle the seam between the lid and the body of the box, all the way around, so that they would serve as a sort of "seal" to contain whatever is inside.

I also purposely made a few of the glyphs wrap around from one side to the next, giving some of them three dimensions and implying that the physical dimensions of the box itself are not a limitation to the powers that seal the box.

After carving the symbols with the dremel, I colored them in with a sharpie marker, because that makes them look old and dark, like they have collected the dust and grime of centuries. Then I stained the whole thing with a dark mahogany wood stain. After staining, I banged the sides and edges with a small hammer to make it look older and distressed. Then I finished it off with several coats of tung oil. I didn't want to leave it without a finish top coat, but I thought polyurethane would kill the authenticity.

The box itself is pretty much done, but I still haven't figured out what I'm going to put into it yet, thus the project remains incomplete. Let me know if you have any suggestions.

Purple BoS with Silver Pentagram

A few months ago I made this blank Book of Shadows. It was done using the paper and glue covering method used on previous projects. It started out as one of the blank sketch books I used for the Puffy Paint books. I added chipboard to the covers and spine to bulk them up. The techniques used for this book aren't anything new, but I did get a little more creative with the design elements. I used chipboard to create the border and the moon phases on the front and back. To create the star on the back, I used two different thicknesses of cardboard (chipboard and "shirt box"). It made for a nice 3D effect.

The whole thing was covered in glue and brown paper and then painted with black tempura paint, and sponged with purple acrylic paint. It was then dry brushed with silver. The pentagram on the cover was made from chipboard and spray painted with flat black and dry brushed with silver, with a little silver rub-n-buff thrown in for good measure.

Like I said, nothing new here, just thought you might like to see it. I had it for sale in my shop for a few days, but my sales clerk decided she wanted it. She is planning on making it into a companion book for one of her favorite tarot decks.

Pentagram Altar Box with Mirror lid

Well, I've been busy spending time with my daughter for the past two months, but now she's back in school, so I can start getting back to my usual distractions.

Here is a little portable altar box I made recently. It is one of several I have made over the past few years. The box itself is one of those pre-build unfinished boxes you can get at the craft store. I drew the pentagram on the top of the lid and carved it out a bit with the dremel. Then I dyed the wood in the pentagram with a sharpie marker before using a mahogany wood stain on the rest of the box. I put three coats of clear poly on it and then added the brass corner pieces at the bottom to act as feet. Although the feet are glued on, I wanted to put brass nail heads over the holes where the screw/nail would go, but I couldn't find any brass brads with big enough heads short of upholstery tacks, which I thought would look terrible,so in the end I left them empty.

The interior bottom is lined with blue velvet and the interior of the lid features a built in black scrying mirror. The glass was hand cut (my first time using a glass cutter :) and blackened with my patented secret process to make a nice shiny black mirror (well, not actually patented, but it is secret and I'm not going to tell you). The edges of the glass were sanded and then wrapped with copper foil tape (the kind used for making stained glass). The glass makes the lid a little heavy compared to the rest of the box. I had to make two mirrors for this box. The first one was a little smaller and had to be taken out because the type of glue I used caused imperfections in the black backing.

New Necronomicon Pages (sets 6 & 7)

Sorry I haven't made a post recently. I've been spending some time with my daughter during the summer. I'm also a lazy sod, as evidenced by the fact that these new Necronomicon Pages were laid out in January and have just now (7 months later) come out of production and are ready to sell.

I've been wanting to create some new sets for a while now, but it always seems to get pushed back on my list of things to do. These pages feature more artwork by ZARONO. These are images that I've had for quite some time, but hadn't used yet (again, because I'm too lazy to lay out new designs). I am starting to run through all the images that he sent me all those years ago, but fortunately I have found some new sources of public domain images on-line. I should probably start working on sets # 8 & 9 while I'm in the mood. Maybe then I can have them in production in time for Christmas.

If you're one of the many people who have been waiting for these pages to come out, they are for sale now on eBay.com and Etsy.com. I usually only sell one of each set at a time, but never fear, I have several copies of these new sets made, and I will be posting them over the next few weeks.