About Heksedans
My name is Mary Brown... soon to be Mairwen Isolde Hrafnskógr, as the law catches up with the truth of my spirit (Oct 24th, 2025). I am a textile and fiber artist, and a pyrographer, rooted in the mist-laced wilds of the Pacific Northwest, where the ancient forests breathe through my work and whisper their stories into every thread and flame.
I am a wildcrafted soul, ink-stained and woodsmoke-scented, with a heart stitched in runes.
An animist and shaper of thread and ember, I move as the old Listamaðr once did... guided by the unseen, listening to the hum beneath the soil. With the patience of a hearth witch and the hands of a maker, I craft more than objects; I call them into being. Each piece... whether pipe or pendant, mantle or embroidery... bears its own pulse, a conversation between earth and ether, between the rooted and the otherworldly.
My path has never been a straight road. It winds through art and ash, through study and surrender. I hold an AA from the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising and a Holistic Health Practitioner Certification with over a thousand hours of training, but it is the long walk through forest and spirit that has shaped me most. It is here, within the quiet rhythm of the Landvættir and the song of stone and root, that I found the heart of my craft... Nordic Animism, and the knowing that all things are alive, watching, remembering.
Under the name Heksedans... Danish for Witch Dance... I bring forth ritual tools and story-woven garments that bridge the timeless and the tangible: Medieval garb, fleece mantles, embroidered spells, wood-burned offerings, and Valhalla Ladders drawn from saga and spirit alike.
Lately, my hands have turned toward history’s hearth... crafting Viking Age and Medieval hats, each sewn entirely by hand, true to the ways our foremothers knew. I'm also a maker of hoods and handbags shaped in the same reverence, and nålbinding works born of the looping patience of time itself.
Everything I make is a conversation... between past and present, between land and lore, between what is seen and what is silently known. It is my hope that when you hold one of my creations, you feel that murmur too: the hum of the old ways, alive still, beneath your fingertips.
Everything I make is a conversation... between past and present, between land and lore, between what is seen and what is silently known. It is my hope that when you hold one of my creations, you feel that murmur too: the hum of the old ways, alive still, beneath your fingertips.
Every choice of material is a continuation of that conversation... an act of respect for the living world and the spirits that dwell within it.
In Right Relationship
Every material I touch carries a story, and I strive to honor it well. The fur, hide, and all animal parts I use are obtained through the Chehalis Tribe near Olympia, Washington... animals taken in the balance of land stewardship and necessity. These are creatures hunted for sustenance, population control, or gathered as road-fallen kin... each one spiritually honored, with nothing wasted where it can be otherwise. I work with these materials in quiet reverence, knowing that their lives are part of a greater cycle of giving and return.
In the same spirit, I seek out natural fibers, fleece sheepskin, wool, linen and cotton from reputable sources that share my care for the earth and all creatures. I do my best to choose materials grown and woven by hands and companies who respect the land as living, who walk gently in their craft as I do in mine. For me, creation is never separate from the soil... it begins there, and so must the care.