Accessory As Medicine: Make-to-Mend a Samhain Foraging Pouch

Guide: Jennette Nielsen

Gather with us for a magical circle, as the veil grows thin at Samhain (Sah-win) and we honor the turning of the wheel by creating our own sacred vessel: a Samhain Foraging Pouch. Using found, reclaimed and upcycled materials, namely leather and wool, we will adorn our darling Foraging Pouches with embellishments, words, amulets, spirit, and personal symbols of deep meaning, mined from our imagination, intuition, visions, dreams, and awakened soul. Our perfectly obscure and enchanted pouches will become our bewitching talismans, our accessory as medicine.

Hand making helps us work out kinks in our past, from the personal to the generational, by transmuting and alchemizing them into portals of deep-self love and acceptance, externalizing our experiences into powerful transformation.  And since our hands know how to mend an issue our intellect has grappled with in vain, we can use our hands to heal our hearts and souls. We bravely thread our needles with soul sinew and stitch our own wild and free nature into our mending and making. We can Make-to-Mend ourselves; honoring our ancestors in so doing, while mindfully fabricating a hand worked self-expressive narrative of healing.

The pouch becomes a medicine bag, a sacred vessel to hold our dreams and desires of self-actualization as well as the loot we scout, forage and gather.  What we will come away with is a container for our precious selves, our beloved treasures, and our prized wild harvests.

What to Bring: Two styles of pouch design will be offered (one with a long strap, or one that is held on by a belt). So bring favorite belt, whether it slides through belt loops or sits over your clothes, doesn’t matter, you will just need it to attach your Foraging Pouch to.  A small array of personal embellishments for the flap of your foraging pouch if you feel called to have them.

Materials Fee: $20 – covers the materials to make the actual pouch and few potential adornments including but not limited to: shells, buttons, stamps and ink, fur, crystals, cording, bones, ribbons, trim and fabric scraps.