I've been working more on my physical product lines, both here in the shop and on my etsy . I've always made as much of the things for my practice as I could, but it's been a long time since I've needed to make a ritual tool, as I kind of have everything I use. When I've started looking at tools to make for you all, I settled on doing sigil discs for you guys, and settled in to make some. I poked at ways to make them fancier, so a few were pretty technical, until I settled into Gabriels. By that point, the technical angles are covered again, and I had really settled in.
When I settled in, there was Gabriel, of course. Because this kind of thing requires some intention, things designed to invoke spirits by nature put you in touch with those spirits. Everything that I talk about with simple coffee can be deepened and intensified with this practice. By tying what you're doing to a physical object and a process, it forces you to slow down, take your time, and put real intention into what you're doing. You CAN'T rush some of this, and the process forces the right mindset.
It's not for nothing that witchcraft is called a craft. The same kinds of things that making something requires, patience, and a particular type of focused detachment, are the things that make for true, deep, magical practice. Mindset here is one of the hardest things to learn in magical practice, and this focus AND detatchment is best explained or experienced in craft. Sewing, woodcarving, even drawing are probably the most common types of this that we experience in the modern age, but when we look back at history, all the things that were considered inherantly magical contained an element of this. Blacksmithing was magical, fiber arts of all kinds were magical. Even the more formal practices of things like alchemy have the same elements of this kind of thing.
The point to this is that mindset, that focus. The point isn't to get the best thing , although it IS to do your best. This is why things used in magical practice were blessed or dedicated TO that magical practices, back in the day. Things you didn't or couldn't make yourself needed to have some time and focus put into it in the same way.
Of course, not everything is best for you to make yourself. Not everything will be functional if you make it yourself. That said, I think there's much to be said for making some things yourself. Especially with spirit work, doing things yourself helps you spend the real time with what you're focused on. It's easy to say that the end result isn't good enough, and you "don't have the skills". That's not the point. A machine will always have a better result than you, but the process itself is what's important.