Forest Wizard

Category: Recipes

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  • Recipe Dump #3 – Candles + Wax

    Recipe Dump #3 – Candles + Wax

    Making candles IS SO FUN AND SATISFYING and if you haven’t done it, I highly recommend you do. The jar candles and wax melts I share in this post are incredibly easy to create.

    However, a few notes:

    First, I learned through this process that essential oils are so perfect for wax melts. The oils and the wax mingle, prolonging the scent, while they are gently warmed on an electric wax warmer. The candles, however, are an entirely mixed bag.

    Essential oils, remember, are volatile oils, meaning that they evaporate quickly at room temperature. If you increase the temperature, they will evaporate faster; hence needing a medium like wax to keep ’em around longer. An open flame, though, will literally just burn the oil. While the scent of the cold candle is, in each case, unfathomably delicious, the scent of the burning candle ranges from pretty ok to nonexistent to actively bad. Proceed with caution.

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  • Recipe Dump #2 – Perfume + Anointing Oils

    Recipe Dump #2 – Perfume + Anointing Oils

    The perfumes and anointing oils I made required two things:

    1. Glass roller-ball bottles (0.35 oz)
      1. I used these ones.
    2. Fractionated coconut oil
      1. This is such a good choice for essential oil diluting. FCO is a cold-pressed oil that has had the long chain fatty acids removed. This means that the oil will remain liquid at room temperature (unlike whole coconut oil).
      2. This oil is also colorless, non-greasy, easily absorbed into the skin, generally scentless (or it has a light coconut scent, light enough to blend into other scents perfectly), and resists turning rancid for much longer than it’s solid-at-room-temp sibling.
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  • Why I abruptly dismantled the EAR / Recipe Dump #1

    Why I abruptly dismantled the EAR / Recipe Dump #1

    For the last several years, the Esoteric Archive of Rochester (EAR) was my main “project.” I am passionate about very specific bits of local history, esotericism, and magic, and I’d been sorely unable to find the community I wanted to explore those topics alongside. So, I set out to start my own. However, in the way I had built it, the project was already a failure, if my goal was to actually build community.

    I was, in fact, building a space (physically and metaphysically) specifically for me. However, I had done so under the guise of “community building” (which I wasn’t doing), so there was also this weird belief that all of the work I was doing wasn’t for me, actually, but for a future visitor or customer. I found myself trying to make deadlines for that customer, stressing myself out attempting to do anything to draw the people to me I wanted to talk to.

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