You’re allowed to take some time off and look after yourself, it doesn’t make you selfish. It’s important to know when to stop and get some rest, eat and do whatever is necessary to make you feel better.
Sigils are pretty much the cheapest magic you can work.
Spoken charms and mudras (hand movements) are free.
Buying pre-processed Cascarilla is a nice convenience but it’s a lot cheaper to grind your own egg shells. You were probably going to throw them out anyhow.
Think Creatively when you shop. Get to know the correspondences of kitchen herbs.
white chalk is crazy cheap and has tons of uses in magic. Circle casting, warding, sigil work. When you must buy, buy multipurpose.
Learn to sew, by hand or machine. You can get nice fabric at a deep discount at garage sales or cut up nice curtains from thrift stores. Tarot bags and cloths, altar cloths, charm bags, poppets - all cheaper to make than buy.
Brush up on local plant lore. Even if you gotta sneak trimmings outta the park. Free is free.
Save the brown paper bags from the store. They make good petition papers when torn up.
Energy Work. Sometimes you don’t need materials at all to get shit done.
Use Birthday candles instead of full size tapers for spells. They’re portable and burn just long enough to work a spell.
A lack of organization can work against you and cause you to buy stuff at stores you forgot you had at home. Keep a small composition book and write down your entire inventory of consumable supplies with key words. Example - “Bay Leaves. ½ jar in stock. Allspice, Nearly out. Ginger root. Out.” Take it with you shopping. This way when you have decided to spend, you’re not frustrated coming home and finding that you just restocked something you had plenty of. Update it during the new moon, or whenever you run out of something.
Use magic! I have sigils going for all kinds of stuff. Finding useful books at a discount. Finding things I need at thrift stores. Saving Money. Put your magic to work for you.
On the subject of saving money - Start a magickal piggy bank. (Mine’s a Pikachu. But still!) When you spend cash, dedicate a certain amount to your witchy fund. Got 75 cents back? 30 percent toward supplies puts one quarter in the bank. It adds up. Bless the bank to draw in Prosperity. Pick up change when you find it. Make a set time when you spend it. On your birthday or maybe every sabbat. Stress free pocket money.
Go hiking at the nearest public park trail or wooded area. Bring a backpack full of brown paper bags and small containers. Willow bark, witches burrs, acorns, black walnut hulls and wood, shavegrass, cinquefoil, four leaf clovers, pine resin, juniper berries, cedar boughs for smudge sticks, styrax resin, buck eyes, wild ginger, river stones, moss, antlers - all free. Make a tradition of it with a witchy or open minded friend. Be safe though.
Make a ritual of shopping. When you have money to spend, ask your God/Dess, Guides, Angels, or Ancestors to lead you to the things you need at prices you can afford. Leave them small offerings in return.
Decide before hand how much you can spend. If you haven’t made an agreement with yourself to shell out cash that day, don’t. The joy of a new purchase made in haste often wanes to be replaced with regret. Don’t taint your magic with regret over money. Your Magic is inside you. It isn’t something you have to purchase access to.
Does anyone else just casually feel like death? Or is that just me? Like I don't want to die but I don't want to be alive and I'm in slot of pain mentally and I don't know how to fix it. People tell me to "just buck it up." But I cant seem to.
Stuff that is relevant to you. Don’t waste time and effort filling out pages of astrology if you aren’t interested in astrology. If you are never going to use the page for that information, don’t waste the page on it. Don’t be worried about what other witches have in their book. This is your book, not everyone’s. And if you are planning on creating some fantastic book that you’ll pass down to your future witch children, know that the your first one probably isn’t going to be the one you’ll want to pass down anyway. Likely information you once thought was important you’ll later find doesn’t matter to you at all. Let your first book be the one you can mess up and explore in. You need room to learn and grow, not worry about every little detail of what you might be missing.
With that said, here is a list of ideas for what you might want to put in your grimoire. This is a collection of ideas taken from all over. Remember to fearlessly scratch things that you aren’t honestly interested in:
-A book blessing/protection to protect it from wandering eyes
-Your personal pages: a page about you and your goals for the craft, the day you decided to be a witch, your natal chart/zodiac info for you and/or your so/birth tarot cards or birth playing card, your craft name or personal sigil if you have one, any psychic abilities you have
-A page for your personal correspondences: your signature herbs/rocks/scent/sound/animal, your craft name/sigil
-A page for your familiar/s if you have any: their given/secret name, their sigil, info about when you met them and when they left/died, what they helped you with, what they like, how they can be contacted
-A portrait of your shadow self
-A list of your current witch tools, where you got them, whats special about them, how they were consecrated (if they were), etc
-An ancestor page: this could be your family tree, pictures of your deceased, locations of graves, etc
-Info about the plants/animals/rocks in your area
-The wheel of the year, if that’s applicable to you
-Esbat/Sabbat information if that’s applicable (personally I only observe the full moon)
-The monthly moon names if you observe the changing of the moon: you can google and see which ones speak to you, or since they’re outdated you can make up your own (for instance I have a Coyote moon because the coyotes howl outside my house, rather than a Wolf moon)
-Any rites/rituals/songs/poems/pictures/quotes/spells/recipes/etc that are important to you and/or your practice.
-A page to keep a list of all your active spells/wards/enchanted items
-Deity: history/picture/correspondence of any deity you are interested in, for secret witches you can have an altar for them inside your book, entries of your relationship/experience with them, family tree of the pantheon if applicable. Even if you worship an entire pantheon, you don’t need to have a page for everyone in the pantheon. And even if you are a secular witch, you can still make a deity page if you so decide.
-Divination info for the practices you’re interested in: history, correspondence cheat sheet, any spreads you think are important, record your readings, a pendulum board in your book if you’ll use it
-Sigils: how to create/charge, sigils you’ve found helpful
-Meditation, Centering, Grounding and Shielding methods/techniques/symbols/pictures
-Dreamwork: a dictionary of your personal recurring dream symbols, a collection of your dreams written/drawn
-Spiritwork: any spirits you are or have been in contact with and basic information
-Correspondences (remember to think about what your correspondence is and not what some list on tumblr tells you): herbs, rocks and crystals, animals,metals, moon phases, planets, planetary retrograde, colors, directions, your witch tools (this is mostly kitchen tools for me)
I collected these ideas (and others) from different sources. What you see here is what I think would be interesting to put in my Grimoire (because apparently people need to be told these things).
1 ) decorations ; a personalized cover (with a picture of the moon, a pentagram, your patronus or something else, or maybe just a nice flowery design or leather cover), using a glitter pen and stickers, pressing flowers between the pages, drawing, taping photos and other visual ideas.
2 ) protection sigil on the reverse of the cover (so people won’t read it without your authorization)
3 ) your craft name and your reason for choosing it
4 ) how you define your path, can include coven rules, the tradition(s) you follow and/or a personal set of magickal rules
5 ) wheel of the year / rituals you observe as the year passes
6 ) dedication to one or several deities you worship (or alternatively, what your relationship with deities is like, whether it’s a specific deity or deities in general)
7 ) on that note, myths and information regarding gods, godesses and deities that could be useful for you
8 ) moon phases, their correspondences and what they’re good and bad for
9 ) elements and their correspondences (including the minor arcana of tarot)
10 ) recipes. not just kitchen witchcraft recipes, but also potions, beauty and cleaning products, natural remedies, powders, salts for a bath, oils, etc.
11 ) herbs/plants/flowers and their correspondences