The Threads That Bind Us

If you're at all familiar with the website, you might look at it and say "Where the Hel did everything go?"  The answer is that we now have some drop-down menus, which you can access from the sidebar.  Some of the pages we had worked better as subpages of the others and have been moved.  However, all pages still have their own unique information on them.  The only real "gateway" page, which strictly leads to other pages, is the "Features" page, which is where we put our photos, videos, and horoscopes.

There will be more site updates in the next few days as I add to the blog and the forums and the store page.

But, that might have to wait for the end of the weekend, because I'm off to the Coast for a strictly fun (no store work) Beltane celebration!  The store will be open and Shanna will be waiting to serve you.  Our full inventory will still be in the store, too; like I said, no work for me this weekend.

Blessed be!

Hey everyone, just wanted to let you know that the May Metaphysical Services & Practitioners directory for The Threads That Bind Us is now available to download in pdf format from http://www.thethreadsthatbindus.net and we've updated our Horoscopes by Gayle page for Beltane to Litha!

Next weekend I personally will be doing a Pagan event in Vancouver for Beltane.  It's not the kind of thing you vendor at, so the store will not be there, but if anyone wants me to bring something specific down, I will do that.

The weekend after is our next Mini-Psychic Fair on the 22nd starting at noon, where we will be showcasing some of our metaphysical and healing practitioners; $2 admission and your donations go to support Okanagan Pagan Pride, and then for $5 you can get approximately 15 minutes of our services.  We'll have psychic readings, Tarot readings, Reiki, Thai massage, Healing Matrix, astrology readings, and more!

The weekend after is our second SCA event of the year, Midsummer in Appledore, in Summerland.  We do intend to vend there (though being a small event, we'll likely have a smaller table).  Our focus there will be medieval items, so if there is something specifically Pagan or metaphysical that you want us to bring, please contact us and let us know.

That sums up our weekends, but don't forget to check the calendar for our ongoing events on Wednesday nights; next week Meditation, the week after is our the Medium, the Witch and the Shaman Discussion Panel, and the week after is my next Practical Magick class, "Finding Fairies."  All these events start at 6 pm; the first two are by donation, and Practical Magick is $5 - $20 sliding scale per person.

Blessed be,

Sable

Just added a whole bunch of new stuff to the website over the past couple of days or so!

The new issue of our newsletter, "The Tapestry," is available for download from our "About Us" page.  On the same page you can also find a link to our sponsored team in the 2010 Run for the Cure, "Pirates for the Cure!"  I'm the team captain and we're running on October 3rd this year to fight breast cancer!  We'll be doing fundraising events throughout the year, with our last big one at our 2nd Annual Talk Like a Pirate Day Sale in September!

We've also created a new page called "Medium, Witch and Shaman" to highlight our events, websites, and work; and we added pics from our land clearing at the Lodge Inn in Cherryville to our Photo Gallery.

We've updated our Metaphysical Library list and our Calendar for all the great events coming up!  We've also updated our "Metaphysical Services" page to match our new rates and list ALL of the many, many services we provide!  If you want more detail on those, you can download a copy of our "April Practitioners and Services Directory" from that page, or pick one up at the shop.

We've also added a new page called "Horoscopes by Gayle," which will feature horoscopes by Kamloops astrologer Gayle Hunter.  The current horoscopes take you from Ostara to Beltane.

We've started a Forums section, and the first forum we've created is called "Ask Sable," which invites you to ask me about whatever metaphysical/herbal/magickal topics you want, and I'll do my best to answer you (or direct you to someone who can!)  We'd also like to encourage our site members to start other topics as well and share our concerns and ideas!

And while work is slow due to limited time, we are slowly expanding our Webstore as well.

It's worth it to come and take a look!  If you're getting this from Facebook, our URL again is http://www.thethreadsthatbindus.net.

Blessed be,

Sable

When Mike of Dreamweaver came into the store the other day to chat and say hello, I took the opportunity to ask him about suppliers that he utilized, and he tuned me in to some great people on this side of the border, which saves shipping, exchange, and duty.  One of the suppliers I called happened to actually be in town today, so he came by, and now I'm broke but you will LOVE the results!  I've posted some pics on the Facebook group; I invite you all to check it out!  The first batch will be here by Friday next week or the following Monday and more will follow!  We're also following up some leads to acquire some Dryad Designs items, some Mythic Images items (Oberon Zell's work,) and new books suppliers as well!  I am really excited about these new leads and I can't wait to deliver these fantastic items to your hands!  Blessed be.

Five original paintings by Adele Woolsey arrived yesterday!  We are featuring four of her African series and one of her "Wall" series, actually a door called "Secrets."  We are also featuring a line of T-shirts displaying her original work.  Come check it out!

This evening we went to our first ever charity auction event, hostessed by Barrita of Cotton's Chocolates (a place where we are not infrequent customers, she makes the best selection of fine diabetic chocolates in town!) who stopped in to the store to give us a personal invite a few days ago.  She runs a foundation called "Sweet Smiles" that fundraises for three orphanages in Mexico, one of which is run by a lady recently diagnosed with cancer, and she set up an event at MoeJoe's Nightclub (who donated the use of their venue) with reasonably priced tickets, and a silent auction, door prizes, and a 50/50 draw to raise money for her charity.

Barrita was this year's Woman of the Year, and for those of you who don't know her, she does a lot of great works in our community.  We felt that having been invited by her personally, and feeling a need to support her very personal cause, we would go (oh yes, and the chocolate covered strawberries she promised didn't hurt either!)

We didn't have a lot of money, but we brought some gift certificates for Reiki and Tarot readings to contribute to the door prizes, and two prints.  Some of you might recognize them; they were point-drawings of two moose, a bull in one picture and a cow and calves in the other.  They've been in the shop forever and honestly, I've had them priced at $10 a piece for months and they wouldn't sell for love or money.  But what many of you probably don't realize is that these were not just crappy thrift items; these were limited edition prints, Number One in a series of 500, by a Kamloops artist named Dan Forster (name sound familiar?  Yeah, he's actually reasonably famous!)  And for months, we couldn't have paid someone to take these pictures away!

Well, Barrita was delighted by our donations, and she immediately added the certificates to the door prizes and set out the prints for the auction.

I am delighed to report that when the auction closed, those prints sold for $75 a piece, and all of that goes to a good cause!  I guess they were just waiting for this event.  Sometimes, things won't sell in a metaphysical store because they are meant for a specific person or purpose, and this, I believe, was one of those times.  Sometimes, though, I guess you don't realize what you've got until it's gone.

On a happy personal note, I also made a bid on a personal tax return offered by Padget (who bill themselves as "The Small Business Pros," that was offered as part of a package with a travel kit from Hyundai.  My winning bid was $45 (a steal for a tax return anyway!) and the travel kit turned out to contain jumper cables, an emergency roadside kit, a cooler bag to keep it all in, flashlight, and a pair of quality binoculars!  Well, it was the tax return I was after (couldn't make a frivolous bid on any of the jewellery or the Snow White limited edition collectable Barbie or anything,) but the other stuff turned out to be a nice and useful bonus!

Sometimes, when you put good things out there, they really do come back to you, and often in happy ways you don't expect.

It was a good evening and a good cause, and our little business was happy to do its little part.  Blessed be!

Well, we'd like to thank you all for a spectacular Yuletide season!  It seems that our Yuletide events and our seasonal gifts discount brought people in from far and wide, and that's what we like to hear!  Please keep making your special orders; we take pride in trying to provide those unique items that you may not be able to get anywhere else!

In particular, we would like to thank the Lower Mainland Pagan community who turned out in droves and made our Yuletide Craft Fair such a smashing success!  I would especially like to thank Ian Sadler (Treewalker) for going to such efforts to book the venue and helping me with the door prize draw; Sam Wagar of the CWABC for helping with the draw and Pagan Pride fundraising; Pixie for regaling us with her lovely belly dance skills; Lisa Forryan for reading Tarot for us; and our wonderful merchants, Celdae, Sharleen Reid, Cheryl Price, Merina Mohr, and Charlotte Freeman for bringing us their wonderful works and for spreading the word amongst their friends!  Congratulations to all our door prize winners as well!

Already new merchants have asked to be part of the next one, and we all had so much fun that we're going to do it again in the spring!  Details will be announced in the next couple of weeks!

We're open our regular hours tomorrow and through the week until the 31st, when we will be closing at 3 pm, and then we will be closed through the weekend for inventory, reopening on Monday Jan. 3.  Tomorrow we'll be hosting our monthly Healing Exchange (all healers welcome!) and then on Wednesday we'll have our last recorded for DVD Practical Magick class, Introduction to Tarot Part 3.

Things will be a little lower key in January than they have been in December but there will still be all kinds of great events going on.  Practical Magick continues (now available by Skype to those who cannot attend in person - see our Webstore for more details at www.thethreadsthatbindus.net,) and our Paranormal Discussion Group resumes on alternate Wednesdays.  Witches' FAQ Night and the Healing Exchange will happen on their usual dates.  On Tuesday and Wednesdays from 11 am to 1 pm we will be featuring natural health practitioner Victoria Willard (best known for her work with Emotional Freedom Technique and Quantum Touch) for drop-in healing sessions, and on Thursdays 11 am to 2 pm Lois and I will continue to be available for drop-in readings or healing sessions.  Victoria will be teaching a workshop on Emotional Freedom Technique on Jan. 16 (registration required,) and Lois and I will be co-instructing a workshop on manifesting and enchanting your New Year's resolutions (details to be announced in the next couple of days, likely on the 9th or the 23rd!)  Then at the end of January on the 30th, we will have our next Mini-Metaphysical Fair!

February also promises to be exciting, with Suki Fox coming to teach her highly-successful Repatterning workshop with us, two SCA events planned in Kamloops and Peachland, and possibly an appearance at a wellness festival organized by Suki in Kamloops!

In the next couple of weeks, check our Calendar, as we intend to try to plan out much of our 2010 eventing season in advance and you will then know where we'll be and what we'll be up to.

Thanks for all your support and may you all have a Happy and Prosperous New Year!

Blessed be,

Sable

Have updated the website today to include upcoming events in our Calendar page, as well as our new contact information.  You can reach us now on Skype: the.threads.that.bind.us.  You should be able to get us Monday to Friday from 11 am to 6 pm Pacific Time.  I especially invite our long-distance customers to give us a call; the video function will let you have a look at our products directly before we ship them, and since our website is currently limited as to the number of products we can display, it also expands your selection!  And of course, from Skype account to Skype account, your call is absolutely free.

There's quite a lot of things coming up in December so it may be easiest to have a look at the Calendar to see what interests you, rather than make a list.

Practical Magick continues in December, but we're trying hard not to schedule things around Christmas, so they will be on the 2nd and the 28th, and we'll be studying "Psychic Self Defense" and the third part of our Tarot series respectively.

Our big announcement is that we are coming to Vancouver for a Yule Fair on December 12th, from 10:30 am to 3 pm at the St. James Community Square; see the Calendar listing or our Facebook group for more details.  So far, we have eight confirmed merchants and practitioners, including ourselves, and there may yet be more as this all comes together!  This event is geared specifically to the Pagan and metaphysical community and is a family event, open to the public in a conveniently-located wheelchair accessible building.  Updates daily!

We also intend to bring our goods to the CWABC Yule Ritual at the Okanagan Centre Hall in Winfield on December 19th at 6 pm.  Email us for more information about the event.

Reiki Level 2 Workshop will be happening on the 9th of December at 6 pm; $44 per person.

We'll also be offering some new features on our Facebook group, with offers on products and services available solely to our Facebook group members.  For instance, we'll be featuring a new pendant and a new pendulum each week, which will be available at a discount.

Please note that we intend, at this point, to be closed for the 21st (Yule,) the 24th through the 26th (Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day,) the 1st and the 2nd of January (New Year's Day and the following Saturday,) and we will only be open from 11 am to 3 pm on the 22nd, 23rd, and New Year's Eve.  This plan may yet change as our families announce their holiday plans, so there will be one more announcement before Yule, finalizing these details.

But, don't forget to stop in before then!  Moonlight Madness happens on Wednesday the 16th of December; in order to facilitate your last-minute shopping, Threads, along with numerous other downtown merchants, will be open until 9 pm!  And for that day, and every Friday up until Christmas, we will be offering 10% off on anything purchased as a seasonal gift for someone else, including ritual items, metaphysical supplies, statuary, gifts, incense, gift certificates for our metaphysical services, bath salts, jewellery and more!

So as you can see, there are lots of exciting things coming up just on the horizon!  See you soon!

So over the past weekend, with my brain leaking out my ears due to a nasty cold, I have made numerous updates to our website, including updating our Calendar of events, adding several new items in our Store section (many of which are our most popular items from the various events we've attended over the year,) and updating our Library listings.  There's several great events coming up over the next month or two, including a Quantum Touch workshop with Victoria Willard, our Mini-Metaphysical Fair, and a travelling presenter who will either be teaching us how to make Yule goddess ornaments, or Chocolate Spellcasting!  Have a look; for my friends on Facebook, the URL is http://www.thethreadsthatbindus.net.

Please note also that if you become a Member of our website, you can book appointments with our practitioners directly online in our Calendar section.

Sable and Erin will be Running for the Cure this Sunday, Oct. 4, in Vernon, BC.  Please check out Sable's donation page at https://www.cibcrunforthecure.com/html/p.asp?t=3826344&l=1 and give generously to this cause!  Thanks.