Jeff Russell

The petals only. Search DIY rosary beads and there are a ton of easy tutorials. However, most of them use a blender and after some Magic Mondays I was concerned about cutting with knife blades if that cut the energy so I deep-googled to find an old 'simmer for many days recipe' that's literally been on my backburner all this week. The traditional is medieval Catholic originally.

I haven't been down the tree path much but the Mary Gardens database has quite a few (Olive, Pine, etc) but interesting nothing about Yew/Taxus. I hope to extend the database to a comparative religions setup when I got it done so I could note interesting things like this, but I'm not there yet.

I haven't found much more about plant based beads yet beyond the rosary. I was going to start experimenting with a mashup of what I can grow and what is the ENM to see where it goes. I can't recall if JMG's book covers it and my copy is in storage (to be dug up soon). I wonder if beads could be made of tree leaves/evergreen needles. IDK! Historically, the branches were turned on lathes for beads. However, there is a modern Catholic tradition where funeral flowers or wedding flowers are mixed with a polymer or resin to make beads if the material is not enough or not suitable for the rose method. I haven't done more than bookmark some links so far.

One interesting historical note is that apparently when rosaries were the rage in England, there was a whole street outside of St.Pauls Cathedral, Paternoster Row, where there were bead making guilds that specialized in various material so the bone guild was different than the rose guild and such. Different religion for you but I think it would be very interesting to learn more about the technologies in use there.