 Hi my name is Danny and welcome to Esoteric Moment. Today I am going to show you how I made my Midori Traveler's notebook. So I did a video a while back on how I made this notebook. It's based on the Midori Traveler's notebook which is a leather kind of case for smaller notebooks and it's really useful because you can organize it the way you want. You can put things in take things out as you need to. I use mine as my planner and my journal and notes for community burden stuff. So I'm going to show you how to make your own because it's a lot cheaper than buying it yourself and at the end of the video I'm going to tell you how you can get your own Midori Traveler's notebook because I am doing a giveaway. So for this project you'll need a few things. You'll need a piece of leather. I just get the Tandy Leather sheet that comes like in the same size as a regular piece of paper. You will also need a hammer and a nail. This nail needs to be the same thickness or a little bit more than the elastic cord that you'll use. I also suggest some leather die which is pretty cheap on amazon and comes in a huge quantity. You'll also need some elastic cord. I recommend like two millimeter thick. I have a link in the description of what works best but it doesn't really matter. Scissors and any beads or charms that you want as decoration. To start I laid out a plastic paper bag that I cut in half so that I have a nice workspace and then I took out my eight and a half by 11 sheet of leather. We're gonna start by making the holes for the elastic to go into. So because this is already the size that I want I am just going to fold it. On the inside I'll mark where that fold was. I'm just using a colored pencil. I'm gonna dye it anyway so you won't see the marks. Now we can decide to do one band or two down the middle and what this allows for are the number of notebooks that you can put into it really easily. I like to put in two so I'm going to put one hole on each side of my middle mark at the top and the bottom to run my elastic band through. To make the holes I'm just going to take the nail and pound into my leather. The size with this stuff if you need to or less precise but really the main thing is you want to make sure that you go as close to the edges you can with still leaving a little bit of room so that the notebook fits and that you're as even as possible. To make a strap to go around the middle Midori itself puts a hole in the back of the leather but I don't really like that because of where the elastic is then located it kind of creates a bump. So I put my elastic hole down the middle um on the spine so it's not as noticeable. In the dyeing process I'm using um this lip and dye that you can get in four ounce containers and it even comes with a little brush to work it with so I just shake it up a little and then I'm going to paint it um left to right and then up to down a couple times until I get the color that I want in the elastic cord. So I measure by just loosely holding the string up over the notebook you're going to want to do it twice the length of where your holes are plus a little extra to tie an ounce. Then I also measure us here for the center strap and leave a little for an ounce. Now comes the fun part. We are going to string the elastic through our holes. If our holes are big enough this will be really easy um I like to do it a little bit tighter so that while it's hard to string the notebook lasts a little bit longer. You can also use your nail or an actual like thicker leather needle to string your cord through. So that goes in the first hole and then on the outside part you're going to string it right back through that top part. Do the same thing on this end. String on the inside and we'll loop on the outside. Still want a little bit of give. The thing about this is that if you ever dislike the color you can always replace the string really easily and the leather will stay nice and on the outside it makes a nice little spine appearance with a little accent of color but also not super noticeable. Now we're going to do the center band and this one is a little bit more tricky. So starting from the outside part we're going to thread through one side of the elastic band. For the kids or charms we're going to put those on bearing out and putting in a knot here and then measuring out putting a knot here so that your beads stay in the same place. Because I'm giving this away I'm going to leave it loose so that people can experiment and find what works for them. After your charms are done then you're going to thread this one back through the same hole from the same side and then you're going to do a double knot on the inside here and trim off your excess. So on the inside of your notebook you have two straps to connect notebooks to and the knot from your band in the middle and on the outside you have a little spine edges and a strap to fold your notebook. So then you just fold the notebook pull the strap around and you have your own Midori style notebook. To insert your notebooks you're going to take the middle part of your notebook and slide it under the straps here. So with two notebooks and two elastic straps you can easily fit two in and that just keeps it nice and thin and simple. However if you want more notebooks you can put one notebook in the middle like this and then take two separate notebooks and open it so that half of it is out on both notebooks and the two insides are connected and then you put a rubber band around it. This can be a normal rubber band, more elastic cord, whatever you want. So it goes down the center of the notebooks and then they kind of flap together like this like wings and you can slide those underneath the notebook you already have attached. So that is three notebooks per elastic band. So this can fit up to six notebooks which makes it really thick but totally doable. So this notebook is great because you can get different types of paper depending on your preference. So I have some plain craft some lined and some grid graph paper here and these notebooks will go with the giveaway and however you're using your notebook you can take things in and out and rearrange them and organize them however you want. So I think it works really well for journaling or planning and even if you're doing a book of shadow or grimoire I think it's really nice that way because you get the beautiful changes that happen to the leather when you carried around without sacrificing the ability to move and change things and reorganize them. So this is the new notebook shiny leather still brand new and this is what has happened to my leather after using it for you know months and months. It's created this really lovely shiny color to it and there's all of these scuffs and adaptations from where I carry it around and you know it's the elastic has stretched out a little but it's easy to replace if I need to and it just feels great. The inside you know is a little less pretty it doesn't have that shine because I don't touch it all the time and in my notebook I regularly keep anywhere from five to six notebooks in here plus other adept tape other editions like a zipper folder and sticky puppets and things like that. In my giveaway I'll be giving away this notebook that I just made the three notebooks inside of it and then some other goodies. I have a little washi tape sampler here. It also includes kind of some plain simple ones for October and this beautiful gold foil spider web washi tape. I'll also be giving away a crystal bible book. It's the Judy Hall ones it's pretty small but it is really nice with great pictures of all the crystals. I haven't decided which crystals yet but I'm also going to give away a couple crystals to enjoy with the package and this dive-in deck which is kind of an oracle deck encouragement cards. There's a bunch of cards that have different collages and you know encouraging statements that are really fun to draw each day. To win this giveaway you only have to be subscribed and write a comment on this video and then I'll draw a name from a hat in a couple weeks. You can find more details for how to win the giveaway in the description below. If you have any questions on how to make a midori let me know. There are lots of other ways that you could do it. This is just the way that I do it. Thanks for watching and as always may you find peace in the sacred grove. Today I'm doing another book review and that is a very popular book that many druids really love that is the Druidry Handbook by John Michael. This author wrote the book while he was the Archdruid of AODA which is the ancient order of druids in America. This book actually serves as the main textbook for their first course in the order.