 A few years ago, I showed you the beginnings of my book of Allen, which is what I call my Book of Shadows or Grimoire. Today, I have an update for you. Hey there saplings, welcome back to esoteric moments. Who here loves Book of Shadows tour videos? I certainly enjoy seeing how other people put their practice to pen and paper and love seeing magical books come to life, which is why a few years ago I shared with you my making of a Book of Shadows or what I call a Book of Allen because I'm not really putting down just reference material and I'm not just putting down small craft. I have a journal system that I use extensively. What I'm really looking for is kind of working out the things that have become regular practices in my practice, putting it to paper and pen and kind of collecting all the inspiration from different stories, quotes and ideas into one place so that when I need a boost, I can reference it. When I need a source of magic for different items and spell crafts, it's all in one place. When I first made my Book of Allen, I did a whole like binding of myself. I did the leather, all of it. And if you follow me on Instagram, you know that it went to the woods a few too many times and came back completely destroyed. I repaired it a bunch. It just eventually it died. So I had to go and get it rebound. I rebounded it to look like this with Grim Bindery, the same place I did my obod gorsi materials. I bound all of those for my Druid coursework. And some of those pages I was able to keep in the rebinding process for this. Some of them sadly weren't going to work because of paper and things like that. So it is going to look a little bit differently. Before we dive in, the front cover has this owl symbol with the same leather as my original book. It's actually the piece that had been on the spine. And it's what I use to kind of invoke the magic aspect of my book and bring it to life. And that's written in a spiral under this piece and glued on to the book. Book of Owen. I have my own Wheel of the Year here. It is not as decorative as many people's Wheel of the Year. It is mostly my own correspondences to different plants and garden processes. You'll see that I also have some of the obod official booklets in here, the Book of Ritual being the first one, and then all of the eight seasonal festivals. So this is information that comes with the Bard course and we use it in my seed group for all of our group rituals. It has a solo ritual which I've used. So I have that for every seasonal celebration. I'm beginning to fill in with some of the recipes and fun things that I do every year. Some pages I start and will come back to finish later. Some are pretty much done. I also have some plant materials that I've dried and glued in. Those are collected throughout the year. Sometimes I know exactly what I want for a page. Like if I'm talking about the summer solstice, I want some of the roses that grow in our pasture that I collect in that morning because that's a magical practice that I do every year and I want to imbue my book with that. There are some pages where I know I'm going to be putting down like our wedding ritual, but I haven't gotten to that point yet. So they're just in pencil a word letting me know, oh yeah, I'm claiming this page for this activity. I use the same font throughout the entire book. One, because I think the consistency just looks good and it's easy to read. Two, because I like the practice of using a different font that's very specific to this book. I've done calligraphy before and while this isn't calligraphy per se, it's the same kind of process. You're practicing that specific letter and that alphabet and it's imbued with a certain sense of focus. There are some experiments with Celtic knotwork on most of the pages. That's something that I'm really hoping to develop more of as I complete the book page by page. You'll see that rituals and practices are intermixed with just informational pages. We get into a section where there are specific pages that I then use like imbuing oil, leaving gifts for spirit guides, pages that I use for divination like OM and the pendulum board. And that's because this book gets used. It is not just a sit pretty. It is not just a pass on. It is a working magical tool that helps document my practice, sure, but also is a part of my practice. In the back, I'm really hoping to do more about the plants that are important to my practice and the grove that I planted and how that relationship has developed. So that is definitely a section that is very much in the works and lots of just like penciled in. This is what's going to happen in the future.