This book is excellent. It is full of creative craft projects for the wiccan practicing person. It is a great way to create items for rituals and altars and it also has recipes for many different items to be made for rituals and the celebrated holidays.
Rating: 5 / 5

Complete Idiot’s Guide to Wicca Craft / 1-59257-262-6

To date, I have found (after exhaustive searching) about three guides on Wiccan craft projects. This is pretty disappointing, since Wiccans are people, too, and we like to make things as much as the next person. Unfortunately, the guides themselves are also somewhat disappointing.

The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Wicca Craft tries to do a little bit of everything – cooking, brewing, sewing, miscellaneous crafting, and so on. Sadly, each topic is remarkably shallow – in this case “a little bit of everything” means, apparently, a VERY little bit.

The section on sewing a ritual robe basically involves buying a really big bolt of cloth, cutting a robe out of the bolt, and then sewing the two sides together and wearing the result. I’m no professional seamstress, but I do know how to sew a robe and I know how to sew a potato sack. The instructions here are far closer to a potato sack. For the record, if you want to sew a ritual robe, I personally recommend buying a “Christmas Pagentry” pattern for 99 cents and sewing up the ubiquitous “Angel Robe”. If you want a hooded robe, check out the Halloween patterns – there’s always a good “Elven Cloak” pattern available. These patterns are professional but not too hard, and you’ll have actual sleeves and a proper neckline and maybe even a back zipper, rather than a potato sack to slip over your head.

Everything else is superficial as well. The full moon cookies are a basic sugar cookie recipe my mom has used for years. The goddess libation is a common non-alcoholic drink mix. The majority of the other crafts utilize children’s craft material – white glue, glitter, paper plates, and so forth. I think this would be a GREAT resource for pagan parenting, but since I don’t have children it doesn’t do much for me.

I think the biggest problem is that a lot of these authors assume that if a person is new to the Craft (i.e. Wicca) then they must also be new to crafting. I’m still looking for a good Wiccan crafting book that is really in-depth and professional, but if you’re looking for a book to involve children in Wiccan crafting, this is probably a decent resource.

~ Ana Mardoll
Rating: 4 / 5