The Dragon Blanket

Yay, now I have a photo of the +1 Spoon of Airy Assurance! Thank you.

*laugh* I did not make the spoon myself; I trawled through an antique store to find a genuine silver spoon. It needed to be silver because silver holds magical imprints very well. (Think of it as psychic SillyPutty.) It needed to be a spoon because ... well, that's how much energy it's supposed to dispense: one spoon's worth. There's an essay about "The Spoon Theory" of energy for people with limited amounts of energy: http://www.butyoudontlooksick.com/navigation/BYDLS-TheSpoonTheory.pdf

What I did was take an antique silver spoon and embellish it. The hanger and the dangle are wrapped wire ... whatever soft metal goes into cheap craftstore findings. The dangle has lapis and quartz beads strung on it: both Air stones, that being the recipient's magical element, plus quartz is the blank diskette of magical stones. That helps hold the "program."

Once I had the physical parts assembled, I could concentrate on the magical aspects. Basically this thing is a self-charging battery, so it needed to be told what kind of energy to absorb (Air), where from (ambient energy and elemental plane), how much to dispense (one spoon's worth: enough energy to do one ordinary task), how often (variable), and under what conditions (when the recipient touches the spoon and wishes for the energy). (Variable = at least 1/week, but not more than 1/day. I would explain the 'variable' by pointing you to the illustration "The Jaguar's Abuse of Spoons" but the search function seems to have vanished in the Stardancer site-upgrade process, temporarily I assume.) Creating that matrix of energy is a mental/mystical task; essentially I held the concepts in mind and then packed them into the metal and crystal storage capacity of the material artifact.

This is an example of the true heart of artifact crafting: the item derived from someone's desire for something that would not ordinarily be giftable -- in this case, more energy -- so I devised a way to make it so. The quirky limitation is traditional for magical artifacts, part of what makes it safe to let out into the world and not do more harm than good.

Request noted and logged. (Yes, folks, I try to keep track of what's popular. If you want to see more of something, pipe up.) I have some scans of scrapbook pages that I plan to post soon. Often the best gifts are not things that can be bought in a store.