It seems like there is a form of divination for everything. There are the usual suspects: reading tea leaves (tasseomancy) and Tarot cards (cartomancy), fire gazing (pyromancy) and bird watching (augury). And there are more esoteric divination methods like spatilomancy (reading portents in animal excrement), tyromancy (divination by cheese), and belomancy (prophesying via arrows). Basically, if it is something humans can observe, they’ve made a way to tell the future from it.
Cleromancy is a divination method that involves casting lots. Subsets of this method include runes and bones, thus the saying “Throwing the bones.” Another method, charm casting, has become popular over the last few years. The Magpie Oracle by Carrie Paris is one example. The benefit of charm casting is that it provides a lot of room for personalization with regards to readings. You choose what charms you want to use and ascribe meaning to them. That flexibility can also be a drawback if you aren’t used to providing your own meaning and interpretation in divination.
Being the big ole sewing nerd that I am, I immediately saw the potential for putting my own spin on charm casting. I also got to play with one of the most common jokes in the sewing world: the true contents of holiday cookie tins. Even if you don’t sew, you are probably aware that shortbread cookie tins rarely actually hold cookies. They are often, instead, filled with sewing supplies (or in the case of my grandmother’s tin, buttons). I saw the opportunity to reject that reality and replace it with one of my own. One in which the tin opened not to a tangle of thread and fabric scissors, but to a throwing mat and silver charms. With that in mind, I present to you the Sewing Tin Oracle.
