A Cool Way to Research Your Ancestors

There’s a genealogist who runs a 52 Ancestors in 52 Week challenge and with our ancestral liturgical period upon us (and indeed all the ancestor holy days literally a week away), I wanted to share this with folks. You can see the challenge here. She’ll probably repost about it closer to the New Year, possibly with new categories for each week, but this gives you a bit of a head start and you can always do this on your own using the 2023 categories if you don’t want to wait, or want to start next week. I did it one year and found it very, very helpful in learning more about and connecting with my dead. It was also a lot of fun.

A third of my own ancestral shrine, photo from 2021 (it’s all been rearranged by now! I do that every quarter.)

General Updates and Reminder about Setting of Lights

I have a couple of updates that I want to be sure to post before the weekend. 

The first, is that I’m offering Setting of Lights on a weekly basis now and will be doing that throughout the year. See more on that here – this is a reminder because the candle shrine opens this Sunday and the weekly deadline for requests is Saturday. 

I haven’t fully set things up yet, but I’ll give you a sneak peek at part of my space. Last year a friend gave me this giant candleholder (the thing is huge!) that he’d gotten at an antique sale.

It’s recycled from a church, I think. I absolutely love it and we originally planned to put it outside by one of our outdoor shrines but there was disagreement about where it should eventually go, so it’s been sitting on my porch for a year. Finally, I realized it was perfect for the candle shrine. I need to give it a good once over with rust remover and a good scrub brush but then it is going to be deployed in the shrine room. I have a secondary small table that will go right in front of it to hold more candles and if I can find it, I may have another cast iron candle holder for that table too (I need to dig through my storage room). I plan on having everything up by Friday evening (and thank you to those of you who have already ordered candles). So, if you are interested, please reach out to me at Krasskova at gmail.com. 

Secondly, I have reopened my etsy shop. I have a ton of new cards, all of which are currently available: 

Irish Deities:

• Lugh  
• Boann
• Aine
• Midir
• Sheela na Gig (it’s complicated, I know, but this one was by repeated request)

English/Germanic

• Hrethe (Hreðe)

Roman:

• Concordia

Lithuanian

• Jurate

Slavic

• Lada

Japanese

• Izanami

They’re all up and available in my etsy shop, which y’all can find at the link above. 

Finally, I’m working on a new project. It’s a year long stitch journal – I got the idea from this blog (and the author of this blog also offers a PDF and explanation of the project for sale). I plan to do this as an offering for the House of Mundilfari (though I’m doing each month individually and then will sew them together and onto a nice backing after I’m all finished, instead of how the author suggests). After all, They are the Gods Who govern time and our cycles and seasons. It seems fitting and at the same time, the stitch work honors my female ancestors, my Disir. When I’m all done, I’ll be able to create a stitch roll, and I’ll attach a button with which to tie it and voila. I’ll put it on the shrine next New Year’s Day as an offering. Here’s what I have done so far (only five days of course since we’re only five days in) (1). I’ve already chosen the back cloth for February’s piece. 

What do all of you have going on devotionally for this month? What goals have you set for this upcoming year? 

Notes: 

1. Space one is the Bayeux stitch, a couching stitch over satin stitch used in the Bayeux tapestry. Space two is just some chain stitch and colonial knots. Space three has tulips and a daisy, and I got to practice lazy daisy stitch, which I suck at lol. Space three is more lazy daisy, and then space five is seed stitch and leaf stitch. In various places there’s also back stitch, blanket stitch, and stem stitch.