For starters let me give huge thanks to Conjure man Ali for posting some of his recipes online. (You can find them at http://ravenconjure.blogspot.com/ They are really fun!) I grabbed this article and decided to give it a try after speaking with Mister Hob about chalks for awhile. He had also tried this recipe so I figured it was high time I tried it. I thought perhaps you may also enjoy seeing how I had done it and how it had worked out. So let’s begin our tour of “Magical Chalks”.
I won’t be giving the recipe I used on my blog because I think you should get it directly from the source and I would hope it would help more people find about the going-ons of Conjure man Ali and perhaps see some of the other cool stuff he has written about. So if you want to try this yourself, go ahead and head here for the full instructions (http://ravenconjure.blogspot.com/2012/09/making-magical-chalks.html)
Alright, lets begin where I began! A delicious egg casserole! For my birthday, The Girlfriend made me a huge egg casserole. We had plenty of egg shells so I figured perfect time to try this chalk recipe. Thus beginith the slide show!
So here you have all the egg shells and a bowl for when I pulled the inner lining out. Each egg has a kind of membrane to it that is very close to the egg shell white with a soft pink shading to it. However if you run your fingers within the inside of the shell you will easy feel it. Peeling these things out is a huge pain. However nothing in magic worth doing is really easy. So you will be pulling these things out for a while. I took me about 30 minutes to get all of the shells I was going to use clean. However being a Virgo I was extremely picky about it. I also about half way through found I had a knack for pulling the membrane out in one swoop. It takes some time but its pretty slick when you can do it!
As you can see its kind of thin and paper-like. But if you do it right, it will all come out in one shot. Which is pretty fantastic! Next comes the part that takes forever! The grinding of the egg shells.
As you can see, my mortar and pestle are pretty heavy duty. I use it for grinding stuff that is really tough. These egg shells are tough believe it or not. I recommend doing only a little bit at a time. You need to grind them to an absolute powder. Conjure man Ali says to remove the larger pieces and he isn’t joking about that! Let me show you what I mean.
This picture more than likely looks a tad distorted but its a really big zoom of the inside of my mortar. You can see those flakes within the bowl along with the actual powder in the top right. The egg shell needs to be powdered like the top. So you still have a long way to go if you have bigger pieces as seen here. I’ll show you what the chalk looks like when you have those bigger pieces and it isn’t pretty. I also imagine it won’t mark for crap but I haven’t tried it yet so I can’t comment. When you actually powder it, it looks fantastic however. You can see Ali’s chalk on his page for when you do it correctly. I’ll be glad to show you what it looks like when you don’t! Anyway, after you powder the shell and mix in the other ingredients he instructs you get a kind of gooy egg ball. This is the point when the shape becomes important. Take Ali’s picture to heart. The ball shape has a ton of advantages. I tried to make mine rather square shape thinking it would be easier to hold and use. It is nice to hold, but it lacks any kind of structural support. So it fell apart quickly. Go with the ball. Trust me on that one! When its all said and done, you have these!
The one on top was the chalk I hadn’t ground well enough. It has obvious spots of huge chunks of egg shell and I had to use more flour than what was called for. You can see that the flour itself has a color and that more or less screwed it up. The one of the bottom had been ground more thoroughly and looks significantly better but still has lots of cracks and is a tad crumbly. Again, I think that more has to do with its shape. Go will the ball shape on this one. I did however learn how to make a kind of chalk I never imagined and will be using them in an up coming spell. I had laced both with “Crown of Success” herbs so my hopes is to use this in such a spell. If you are so inclined as to give it a try, let me know! I’d love to see how yours came out! Grinding up eggs to make this powder is a very very old tradition and if you decide to walk those paths, you may find yourself doing this more than you could have ever imagined. This also makes a very fun children’s project if you leave the magic out of it.
-SilverShadow
