Icy Sedgwick

Folklore & Fantasy Fiction

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Crafters Share Their Handmade Pre-Craft Rituals and Traditions

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Crafts are incredibly important; in the UK, we have the Heritage Crafts organisation, which works towards ensuring the survival of traditional craft skills. Many crafts are a form of intangible cultural heritage, and when we practice them or pass them on, we’re helping to ensure the survival of practices that might otherwise disappear. Our own […]

Skiffle: A 1950s British Musical Craze with DIY Instruments

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When you think of the term ‘handmade’, you might not immediately think of music. After all, we buy instruments; we don’t generally make them ourselves. Yet in the case of skiffle, this is precisely what people did. So it seems only right to begin Handmade Folklore Month with the musical genre of skiffle, given the […]

Three More Female Ghosts from North East England

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October rolls in here in the north east of England with crisp morning air, papery leaves finally falling from the trees, and the very scent of autumn. The darker nights have already given us some gorgeous shows by the aurora borealis! Yet October is the month of Halloween. So in honour of the month, I […]

Three Ghostly Tales from North East England for Halloween

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Where summer sometimes lingers in September, offering the occasional warm day and fine weather, October rolls in here in the north east of England with crisp morning air, papery leaves finally falling from the trees, and the very scent of autumn. It is, after all, the month of Halloween. And in honour of the month, […]

Very Very Frightening: The Folklore of Thunder and Lightning

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Thunder and lightning offer one of nature’s more cinematic spectacles, so it’s unsurprising they would accrue a degree of folklore. The danger that lightning particularly poses sees a range of practices to ward off storms, while other traditions offer a way to predict events using storms. Thunder and lightning also work together, as the Met […]

The Folklore of the Autumn Equinox: Marking the Sun’s Path

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The autumn equinox falls on 23 September in the UK in 2026. This marks the definite slide towards the winter solstice! In terms of folklore, there are many articles about the autumn equinox from a neopagan perspective. Yet the festival only gained the name ‘Mabon’ in the 1970s, named by American Aidan Kelly. He chose […]