Homemade Moisturizing Creams

Posted on March 10, 2013 | Leave a comment

I’m still here, I promise! Still selling oils and everything. There’s just been lots of family demands on my time, so little blogging time, alas. Both kids are sitting around watching television like zombies this morning, though (we’ve all been sick), so I decided to provide readers with directions for making two different moisturizing creams.


I have really dry, sensitive skin that cracks in the wintertime, and my daughters have inherited that from me. We go through a LOT of moisturizing cream. And it has to be unscented, because scented body products give me a headache (I got into the oil business largely through an overactive sense of smell, which means all personal care products I use have to be perfume-free). Unscented natural moisturizers can get expensive, especially if you’re slathering three out of four family members with it at least twice a day, so I started making my own. For the most part, I use whipped coconut oil moisturizer at night, because it doesn’t matter if our skin is a little greasy when we get into our pajamas. But for mornings, we need something that’s going to be absorbed fast, and soothes irritated skin. Here’s how to make both of the moisturizing creams we use in our house.


Nighttime Coconut Oil Cream:

Ingredients:

  • 1 cup coconut oil (solid at room temperature)
  • 1 teaspoon natural Vitamin E oil
  • 2-4 drops of essential oil for scent (I leave it unscented, but I put vanilla essential oil in the mixture when I make it for other people)
  • Mixer with wire whisk attachment – easier with a stand mixer, but still possible with a hand mixer

Directions:


  • Put all the ingredients in a bowl – do NOT melt the coconut oil; it has to be solid in order to be whipped.

  • Mix on high speed with a wire whisk for six or seven minutes, or until it’s been whipped up to a fluffy consistency.

  • Spoon the cream into a glass jar and cap tightly. It can be stored at room temperature or, if the temperature in your house is warm enough to liquify the oil, in the refrigerator.



Daytime Coconut-Oatmeal Moisturizer:

Ingredients:

  • 1/4 cup of oats (regular rolled oats, not steel cut or quick-cooking)

  • 3/4 cup of coconut oil

  • 2 or 3 drops of rosemary essential oil (optional – rosemary oil is good for your skin, but if you don’t like the smell, you can skip it)

  • 1 tbsp of olive oil


Directions:

  • Grind the oats to powder with a food processor, blender, Magic Bullet, etc. Grind them up as fine as you can – anything other than powder and the oats will settle to the bottom of the pan when you’re mixing this up.

  • Put the solid coconut oil in a pan over low heat and melt until it’s completely liquid, but not boiling.

  • Add the rosemary essential oil to the liquid coconut oil, if you’re using it.

  • Add the oat powder to the liquid in the pan and ensure it dissolves. This is a key step. If you don’t wait long enough for the oat powder to dissolve, the cream isn’t going to turn out well. Stir it a few times, and be sure the mixture does not boil at all while you’re waiting. The pan just has to be warm enough to liquify the coconut oil; you’re not cooking anything here.

  • Once the oat powder is totally dissolved in the oil – it will look cloudy, but not clumpy – add the olive oil. Stir to mix.

  • When all ingredients are completely mixed, remove the pan from the heat and immediately pour the liquid mixture into a glass container. Cap the container tightly and put it aside. It will harden over several hours. Stick it in the fridge to make it happen faster.

  • As with the other cream, you can store this on a shelf or in the fridge.


These creams are best for really dry skin. If you’ve got “normal” skin, you may find these too oily, and that they leave a residue on your skin. On the plus side, even if you do get your pajamas a little slimy, the fact that the creams are made with entirely natural ingredients means that everything washes out easily. You don’t need much of either of these creams – a dab will usually go a long way.


From a magical perspective, rosemary is associated with happiness in the home, so you could even call this a magical moisturizing lotion if you wanted. Rosemary is great for your skin, which is why it’s normally used in these mixes, but if you wanted to substitute another essential oil for scent, you could do that. Just be sure it’s an essential oil that will not irritate the skin – cinnamon scented body lotion might sound awesome, but please believe me when I say it’s a really, really bad idea. Sweet orange is probably okay, as long as you don’t go overboard, and scents like vanilla turn out really well.

Hope those of you with dry skin find these recipes as helpful as I have.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in DIY, instruction, oils, recipe

Tagged , ,

Work Not On The Website

Posted on January 19, 2013 | Leave a comment

As I was making two oils into a spray last night, I realized that I’d never publicized the fact that Quadrivium Supplies does custom work. We have our standard 20 oils, but if there’s something you need and can’t find, we can probably make it for you.
Here’s some custom work we’ve done recently:

  • Sage spray – for people with asthma who can’t use smudge sticks, or those who are in spaces where incense or smudging is prohibited, we make a spray that consists of essential oil of sage boiled in distilled water with a handful of solid sage. Then we filter our the solids and bottle the spray, which seems to work just as well as smudging for purifying a space.
  • Oil combination sprays – there are oils on our standard list that mix really well together, like Crown of Success and Fortune & Favor, and work very well as a spray for use on clothes, shoes, (possibly) yourself, even as a room spray or linen spray. That particular one has been nicknamed “Crown of Fortune,” since it’s been quite popular. We can turn any oil into a spray, and it doesn’t even cost all that much. The customer buys the oil, the creation of the spray takes about 1/4 of the bottle, we charge a nominal fee for the spray bottle and herbs used in the spray creation, and the customer receives whatever oil is left over and the spray.
  • Custom oils – maybe none of the 20 standard oils address what you need. If that’s the case, you can contact us and we’ll create something customized for your purpose. Barring some kind of astrological miracle, we cannot make custom electional oils, but we do use planetary hours and days when making custom oils, as well as the lunar calendar. If we have what we need on hand to make your oil (and our inventory is pretty extensive), you’ll be charged the regular price for a standard oil and a nominal fee for the research and time spent creating it. Most custom oils end up costing about $15. If we don’t have the ingredients you need, but you still want the custom oil, the cost of the ingredients will be added to the oil. Since we don’t normally use all that much of a given herb or essential oil, you’ll be given the option to receive the rest of the ingredient you purchased, if you’d like to have it.

Starting in February, there will be a page added to the site that will list consultation fees. You can always email us for help using the oils, but if your problem involves six emails and a telephone call, there has to be some kind of compensation for the time. But don’t worry – your emails of “HELP I HAVE OIL X AND HOW DO I DO Y WITH IT?!?!?” will still get answered for free.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in business, new products, oils, special offers, Uncategorized

Tagged , , ,

Happy New Year!

Posted on January 9, 2013 | Leave a comment

Quadrivium Supplies has now been in business for a WHOLE YEAR! We started out with five oil mixes sold in a Chicago occult store and a Notepad-coded website. Now we’ve got 20 oils, a gorgeous website from Xarc Design, the coolest Q-logo ever and nifty custom bottle labels from Amy at Not Dead Yet Studios, and we sell at a number of online and retail establishments.

My apologies for going “dark” for the last month – hip surgery and the holiday season make a potent combination. I have a number of blog posts that should get finished over the next few weeks, about exciting topics like solid material in magical oils and even MORE information on the lack of any kind of governing body over essential oils and their purity. My “MLM Essential Oil Scam” post is still, by far, the most popular post on this blog, and recently received an absolutely EPIC comment from a Young Living distributor who pretty much made the case for Young Living being a scam by her defense of it.

(If you’re someone considering Young Living, using Young Living, selling Young Living, or concerned about a friend or family member being involved in Young Living, here’s the Quackwatch report on Gary Young – which, surprise, comes to the conclusion that he and his company make outrageous, unsubstantiated claims about their oils. There’s a good short rundown of the major issues with Gary Young and his business from an aromatherapy perspective at aromaticsage.com, and a link in the earlier blog post to a report by Cropwatch about the lack of regulation in essential oil production and how the vast majority of Young Living’s claims about certification, grading, and purity are at best misleading and at worst, actively dishonest. I hope it helps. These MLM schemes sink their hooks into people very, very deeply.)

There’s some new books on magical oils that have come out in the last few months, including Llewellyn’s Complete Formulary of Magical Oils. Give that one a miss – it’s a messy mish-mash of recipes from various traditions with no coherent underlying table of correspondence and some seriously baffling suggestions like making graveyard dirt from herbs. In contrast, Manfred Junius’s Spagyrics: The Alchemical Preparation of Medicinal Essences, Tinctures, and Elixirs was excellent and really worth the time and effort to get through, as it’s not an easy book.

Happy 2013!

→ Leave a comment

Posted in blog, oils

Tagged

Non-Oil-Related Update

Posted on November 26, 2012 | Leave a comment

On the 28th, I’ll be going in for major hip surgery. Quadrivium Supplies will not be shipping orders between November 28th and December 15th – you can place orders, if you like, but they won’t be shipped until after the 15th.
The trouble with microbusinesses – the owner goes down, the whole company goes down with her. At least for a while!

→ Leave a comment

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged

For A Limited Time – Mercury Dimes For Sale

Posted on November 24, 2012 | Leave a comment

Some exciting news from Quadrivium Supplies – for a limited time, we are offering Mercury dimes for sale!

The Mercury dime is a ten-cent coin struck by the United States Mint from 1916 to 1945. Designed by Adolph Weinman and sometimes referred to as the Winged Liberty dime, it gained the term “Mercury dime” because the depiction of Liberty, in her winged cap, was often confused with the Roman god Mercury. The reverse of the coin shows a a bundle of wooden sticks with an axe blade emerging from the center, called a fasces, symbolizing unity and strength, and an olive branch, signifying peace.

small mercury dime reverse of mercury dime

In hoodoo and some other forms of American folk magic, a Mercury dime is considered an extremely lucky talisman. Traditionally, it is pierced, anointed with oils, and worn on a cotton string around the ankle. It is said to turn black if the wearer is being attacked with negative magic. Other practitioners wear a Mercury dime as a pendant around the neck for the same reason, but also as a charm for luck. The Mercury dime is also a common item found in “mojo bags” or “mojo hands” created for various purposes, usually related to luck or money. Due to the god Mercury’s position as patron of games of chance and sleight of hand, the Mercury dime is considered a powerful talisman for gambling purposes.

We recently discovered a local coin dealer who had something of a stash of circulated Mercury dimes. This means the coins are somewhat worn and tarnished, as they were actually used. A coin dealer would find that this makes the coin worth less to them, but for magical purposes, a circulated coin may well be more effective than an uncirculated one – the theory is that the coin has been in contact with other money and has been “in the flow” of circulation, and will work more effectively for attracting wealth. Leap year Mercury dimes (1916, 1920, 1924, 1928, 1932, 1936, 1940 and 1944) are considered especially lucky.

Certain Mercury dimes are worth a lot of money to coin dealers, due to imperfections or errors in stamping. Dealers buy lots of 100 or more coins at a time in order to get the rare one or two in the batch. The rest of them are sold off in various ways. Our local dealer was happy to find someone who’d take his “extra” Mercury dimes off his hands at a fair price. They’re more expensive than they used to be, as the price of silver has gone up and Mercury dimes are 90% silver, but not unreasonably priced if you can buy them in batches.

Quadrivium Supplies is now carrying Mercury dimes, probably for a limited time. We will be listing the dimes by year as they come in, and allowing customers to select which particular dime they’d like to purchase. Customers are welcome to ask for photographs of the particular coin they’re interested in before committing to purchase, and we are willing to clean the tarnish off purchased coins if requested. In case the customer is interested in wearing the dime as jewelry, we’ve obtained some bezels (basically, a metal circle that snaps around the dime and has a screw-on top with a jump ring in it so that it can be worn as a pendant) and silver chains so that we can offer Mercury dime necklaces to our customers. As a loose coin or a pendant, a Mercury dime is considered to be a powerful luck and money talisman – one uniquely suited for use with ritual oils.

If you’re interested in buying one of our Mercury dimes, the Quadrivium Supplies Mercury Dime site lists the coins currently available. It is updated as we buy lots of new coins, and as other coins are sold. The dimes are available by special order only at this time – if it turns out that we are able to obtain a steady, reliable supply of the dimes, they will be added to our list of products.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in business, new products, special offers

Tagged , , , ,

Ritual Oil Reading List

Posted on November 16, 2012 | 2 Comments

Books on oils – good, bad, indifferent, but probably all worth reading if you’ve got the time and the cash to invest.

Making a reading list on this topic is very difficult, because there’s no one book I can point to and say “Here, you should read this, it’s absolutely accurate and will teach you all about making oils!” There’s been a fair number of books on oils published and while some of them are absolute bullshit from start to finish, some of them are fairly good with some gaping blind spots, some are pretty awful with some good information hidden inside, and some are publishing information available in other places, but written in a more coherent way and thus more useful.


And with all the books, it depends on your personal tradition – most of them are written with a particular table of correspondence in mind, and if that’s not YOUR table, it makes the book less useful. A lot of them (okay, the vast majority) are recipe books as well, and if you don’t use those recipes, the book is less useful. Not useless, though, as basic oilmaking instruction can stand alone, outside the correspondences. Some of it is just mechanics, after all – how to mix an oil, how to make a cold-pressed oil, how to use phases of the moon in oil making, etc.


With all of this in mind, here’s at least a beginning of an annotated book list for making magical oils. Eventually, the book list will go live on the Quadrivium Supplies website, but the list is going to start out with blog posts on the topic. Remember that these are books I have found personally useful, and that their appearance on this book list in no way constitutes an overall endorsement of the contents or author. The list is in no particular order.
(Wow, I’m a huge pain in the ass about book lists, aren’t I?)

 

    • The Voodoo Hoodoo Spellbook, by Denise Alverado – my interest doesn’t lie with hoodoo, voodoo, or the spells presented in this book – just the section on oils. It’s clear, cogent, and provides detailed instructions for making a variety of oils. The table of correspondence that Alverado uses owes more to the tradition of New Orleans voodoo/hoodoo that she practices than it does to any traditional hermetic correspondences, but her explanations of how oils work and WHY they work is well worth reading. She also gives a fair number of recipes for beginners to try and if you’re nervous about starting from scratch and inventing your own oils, following recipes can be an excellent way to get people started in oilmaking.

 

    • The Complete Book of Incense, Oils and Brews (Llewellyn’s Practical Magick), by Scott Cunningham – I can hear many readers recoiling from here. I am not a fan of much of Cunningham’s work, popular though it may be. However, this book, along with Cunningham’s Encyclopedia of Magical Herbs, provides beginners with a very easy-to-follow and coherent explanation of what oils are, how they’re used, and how they’re made. His tables of correspondence are neo-Wiccan and I have used very few of his recipes – however, these are easily accessible books that provide a fairly good grounding in the concept of magical oil creation and use.

 

    • Magical Oil Recipes, by Lady Gianne – probably contains the best basic practical introduction to magical oilmaking in the three page introduction to what’s really more a pamphlet or a chapbook than a true “book.” The whole thing, recipes and all, is 43 pages and costs less than a dollar in the Kindle store. The author covers how and why to disinfect glass oil storage bottles, why oil storage bottles should be dark, what different carrier oils are and how they’re used, how and why oils are blended and to what effect, and the difference between an essential oil and a carrier oil. Her table of correspondence is short and to the point but provides no reference sources – as far as I can tell, it’s a mixture of neo-Wiccan and hermetic tables. If you’re a purist about your tables, this probably won’t thrill you, but frankly, I’d spend the .99 for the Kindle download (you can read it on your computer or your phone) and count it as money well spent even if I never tried any of the recipes.

 

    • Traditional Witches’ Formulary and Potion-making Guide: Recipes for Magical Oils, Powders and Other Potions, by Sophia diGregorio – Ms. diGregorio gives an overview of oilmaking that includes astrological and lunar timing, suggests substitutions for hard-to-find ingredients, and actually provides sources for many of the recipes that she gives. Some of the recipes are old enough to contain ingredients that are poisonous or otherwise dangerous, and the author gives suggestions for substitutions for these ingredients (I’m normally a big believer in sticking as close to original recipes as possible, but not if handling the plant in question is going to give me hives or if the resulting oil will make me ill if I get it on my skin). It’s considerably more substantial than the Gianne book – about 183 pages.

There’s more books on oilmaking to cover, but I’m going to leave it there for the moment. What are YOUR favorites? I’m always happy to hear from people who want to recommend (or warn against) a book they’ve read on the topic.

→ 2 Comments

Posted in blog, instruction, oils

Tagged , , ,

Comment to Win An Oil

Posted on November 9, 2012 | 14 Comments

I did this on FB, so I might as well do it here, too. Leave a comment with the name of an oil you’d like to have – after 72 hours, I’ll use a random number generator and someone will win the oil they picked.
Go!

→ 14 Comments

Posted in Uncategorized

Tagged

Where Do I Buy….

Posted on October 26, 2012 | 1 Comment

I get asked about where to get the ingredients for the oils I make. While I would much prefer you buy your oils from ME (obviously), I know there’s a lot of do-it-yourself types out there. This is the first in an installment of “Where Do I Buy….?” entries.

Where Do I Buy Essential Oils?

Probably better subtitled “If I’m a beginner with oils and don’t have any clue of where to go or who to ask or what to look for.”

These days, essential oils are a lot easier to get than they used to be. Most natural food stores carry them – but they carry different lines, different brands, and it’s hard to tell which are the reliable national brands and which aren’t as reliable. And then there’s stores that carry a whole rack of oils next to their incense displays, which lead people to believe that these are essential oils – but they’re not. They’re “fragrance oils,” or “essential fragrance oils,” or “essential oil blends,” – none of which are actually essential oils.

Something to remember:
The area of essential oils is rife with fraudulent marketing ploys, as I’ve said before. The only essential oil is the one that says it’s a 100% essential oil. Not a fragrance oil, not an essential oil blend, not a ritual oil, not a magical oil, or an anointing oil – none of those terms mean anything other than “this is not an essential oil.”  It might be tempting, when you see the price difference between the “fragrance oil” and the “100% essential oil,” but you’re not making potpourri.  You’re making magic.

It’s hard to know what to look for, so here’s three national brands that I’ve found to be of uniformly pretty good quality.  These are oils priced for retail sale, so the price may be a bit higher than if you buy in bulk, or on eBay. However, they are national companies with quality control standards and a uniform means of making oils, which counts for quite a lot when you’re just learning about essentials.

  • Aura Cacia – this is a company that makes a variety of products with essential oils, as well as providing the essential oils themselves. They also make essential oil blends and other products, so you have to be careful to ensure that what you’re buying is from their essential oil line. Everything is documented on their labels – if there’s any additives, if the oil has synthetic ingredients, if it’s diluted – and on their website.
  • Nature’s Alchemy – owned by Lotus Brands, is sold in many retail outlets. They sell in .5oz and 2oz sizes. This is probably the brand I have the least experience with, but I’ve used three or four of their oils and found them to be about the same as the other nationally available brands. This is the brand usually available at the Vitamin Shoppe, but you can also buy via their online shop.
  • NOW Essential Oils – some are organic, some are not. Their citrus oils are cold pressed, everything else is steam distilled, and it’s a US company that distributes all over the country. The oils are available on Amazon, and through other online outlets, as well as through the NOW Foods website. These oils are sold in many health food shops, Whole Foods, and other places.

Some of the more expensive and scarce oils, like sandalwood, are sold as blends – in some cases, 10% sandalwood essential oil and 90% grapeseed oil. As long as all the ingredients and the ratio of essential oil to carrier oil, are on the label, it’s a perfectly legitimate way to make a very expensive essential more affordable.  Always read the labels.  If the price seems too good to be true, check the labeling.  You might have run into a sale (score!) or you might have run into a company or store hoping that the consumers aren’t well-educated about oils and the marketing practices used.

So that’s how you buy essential oils locally if you’re just starting out.  Thoughts? Questions?  Criticisms?  Let me know.

 

→ 1 Comment

Posted in instruction, oils, Uncategorized

Tagged , ,

Using a Base Oil in Making Magical Oils

Posted on October 24, 2012 | Leave a comment

When I talk about magical oils, I usually talk about the three parts (…est omnis divisa in partes tres – that was a joke for anyone who ever took Latin. All three of you.). The essential oil(s), the herbal component, and the base oil.


So what’s a base oil? In the aromatherapy world, a base oil is also known as a carrier oil, since it carries the essential oil to the nose or skin. Normally, a base oil is defined as “a vegetable oil derived from the fatty portion of a plant, usually from the seeds, kernels or the nuts.”(Source: aromaweb.com ). Because essential oils are so strong and because they’re volatile oils (rapidly evaporating), they need to be diluted and “fixed” with something that doesn’t have much of a scent and doesn’t evaporate. That’s where base oils come in.




There’s a number of base oils used to mix with essential oils. Probably the two most popular are sweet almond oil and grapeseed oil. Another popular “base oil” is actually not an oil at all – jojoba “oil” is actually a wax that’s liquid at room temperature. Recently, there’s been a surge of interest in using coconut oil, which is actually solid at room temperature. It’s possible to mix essential oils into coconut oil, however (a subject for another post), and people have had good results – it just takes more work than simply mixing two oils together. There’s going to be a guest post very soon from a coconut oil expert on using coconut oil with essential oils, but I am not that expert.
All I know is that it makes a great moisturizer for hair and skin.


To my way of thinking, the choice of base oil does not matter from a magical standpoint. The magical ingredients are the essential oils and the herbs – the base oil is just there to dilute the essential and prevent it from evaporating, and to help try to prevent pure essential oils from irritating skin.


People are often surprised by just HOW MUCH carrier oil is used with essential oils. For a strongly scented oil, you can use about ten to fifteen drops of essentials to 1/4 to 1/2oz of base oil. Base oils are almost unscented, though many of them have a faint nutty odor, and they carry the smell of the essential oil really well.

It’s easy to overdo it, when it comes to essential oils. Start with the base oil, add the essentials sparingly. And the herbs will get covered later.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in oils, recipe

Free Oils, For A Price

Posted on October 7, 2012 | Leave a comment

Do you have an occult/magical/witchcraft/related blog or publication? Want to review some Quadrivium Oils? Please contact us – we’re always looking for new reviewers.
In addition, if you’re a blog or podcast that hosts giveaways or provides “swag” to listeners or subscribers, we’re usually pretty happy to provide some oils free of charge for you to give out to your fans.
Please contact us at info@quadrivium-supplies.com and tell us who you are and what blog/podcast/magazine/publication you’re with. It doesn’t have to be big, it doesn’t have to be famous, we’re just looking to get our name and product out there in front of customers.

→ Leave a comment

Posted in business, giveaways, marketing, oils, reviews