Wednesday, April 20, 2011

Yarn magic

The fantasy book I'm reading right now is Blackveil by Kristen Britain.

(This is the fourth book of the Green Rider series, and you can read my review of the first book here.)

Yet again, no one in this book (with the possible exception of one) is called a witch. But quite a few people use magic, so for the purposes of the party Witches in Fiction they're all witches. :)

There's one woman in particular whose magic interests me. She's just known as Grandmother. I'll share an excerpt from the first chapter of this book which demonstrates how her magic works.

From the basket she carried over her wrist, she removed a skein of red yarn and cut a length of it with a knife that hung from her belt. Her fingers were cold and stiff, but moved nimbly to tie knots, and as she did so, she spoke words of power. . . . .
When she finished tying the knots, she breathed on them, and they tightened of their own volition, flexing and melding together into a single mass that transformed into a luminous red salamander perched on her palm Her people, she knew, still only saw a snarled wad of yarn.
"Find the road," she commanded the salamander, for it was a compass
It gazed at her with eyes of coal andl ashed its serpentine tail this way and that until it settled on a direction, pointing the way with its tail. The others probably saw nothing more than a loose end of yarn lifting in an air current.
Maybe because I love to use yarn, and even spin my own yarn, I find the idea of using yarn in magic fascinating. Grandmother uses yarn for all her magic, and believe me she does cast a wide variety of spells. It seems that her yarn is quite versatile!

3 comments:

Magaly Guerrero said...

I enjoy reading about witches who have their own style--the more personal, the better. For instance, most of my witching is done through storytelling, dancing, and um... with my Piano Man.

If you ever come up with some yarn magic of your own, let me know; I would sure love to read about it!

Magaly Guerrero said...

P.S. I guess Ms. Insomnia is visiting you, huh? I'm up because I took an incidental 6 hours nap today lol

Dancing With Fey said...

Well, several years ago while I was officially a witch I did crochet an anklet to help with healing. I also crocheted a "medicine pouch" (for lack of a better name) for the same purpose.

Actually I wrote this post at about 10:30pm my time. I'm usually up at that time. And I did beat Mr. Insomnia last night. :)

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