 Hey, my name is Danny and welcome to Esoteric Moment. Today I wanted to share a project that I've been working on and that is my book of Allen or Book of Shadows Grimoire, whatever you call it. For a really long time in my practice, I didn't use a Book of Shadows much. Just wasn't necessary to do anything that I wasn't already doing in my personal journal. Very rarely were there things that I wanted to keep written down or information that I wanted to collect together. I attempted at one point to use a black plain sketchbook as a Book of Shadows, but I didn't get very far. It was never a super inspiring project. There were a few pages that I found really interesting or that I liked a lot that I've migrated or I'm in the process of migrating over to my new book. Day job is at a library and part of my duties include book repair. This work has always inspired me to take a book binding, but I've never really had the time or inspiration to do something. So when I finally decided I wanted to put a book together for my practice, I thought this was the time to pick up book binding. There are many things that I'd probably do slightly different if I did a book again, but overall I'm very pleased with the way the actual book turned out and I wanted to share a little with you. So you all know that I use a Midori Traveler's Notebook that I made myself and I hand dyed it. That leather process I thought was really great, but for this book I wanted to attempt using pre-died leather and it's one of the things I would change. I loved hand-dying leather so much I definitely would prefer to do it that way if I ever made a book again. I did however pick out a very bright bright yellow leather. The inside, the like wrong side of the leather is actually what I chose to have facing out because it's a softer yellow than the right side of it was. It was a little too orangey for me. So it's got this kind of weird texture from the dyeing process on it that makes it look a little more unique and antique. On the spine I have just this very simple owen symbol that I covered in leather and on the other side of this edition is where I put my book blessing, my book dedication and kind of the magic for the inside. I used a leaf motif on mulberry paper as the end paper. It's a little see-through so I had to use two layers but it makes it very organic and druidry right away. I won't show you all the pages but I'm kind of trying to keep it very simple. I chose multiple types of paper to use in my book. This is where I probably made things more complicated than I necessarily needed to on my first go-around. There is paper that has been handmade with yellow flower petals in it. Other paper I took out of a sketchbook. Finally I also bound the seasonal festival guides from the Bard course through Oba. So my book already has those rituals and I don't have to rewrite them. There's space in between each of those pamphlets for me to add some of my own festival takes and you know rituals. I also included some ribbons. There's a yellow one, a lace one and a navy satin one. I've already started to do some pages and I have glued with PVC glue, some plant materials. I've done headings and I'm kind of sticking with blue and green as my colors. There's also some herbs that I've glued in and I keep a sachet of herbs in the book while I'm not working on it. So this little bag has rose and rosemary, caraway and some lavender in it. All important herbs for my practice and it makes my book smell amazing. So I chose to call my book a book of owen. One because it's just a little bit more druidry in my perspective and the other because I'm hoping that this book will be something that I can pass on and share with others about my practice but it's also still very personal. So book of shadows didn't quite encapsulate what I wanted for my own practice and seemed a little bit more wicked gear. So I wanted this to represent where my path is right now. I have grand ambitions of making it super organized but already it hasn't happened so much so I'm just going to kind of see where the project takes me and I'm sure it will take me many, many years to fill the entire thing out. There are probably like 200, 300 pages in here. It's hard to tell because I didn't count when I was stitching the pages together and because the paper is all different types, it's harder to judge exactly what's going on. Another type of paper that I included is some vellum so it's that see-through paper and I kind of interspersed it with other types of paper that I put in here. The nice thing about making your own book is you get to do exactly what you want and you don't have to compromise. For instance there are some amazing books on Etsy but many of them had like the binding strings along the spine and I don't really like that. It's not as easy to do repairs in the book later and I frankly think it leaves that stitching a little exposed so longevity wise that wasn't something I was interested in. I also wanted something that was uniquely mine and I wanted the paper to be exactly what I wanted. A lot of the books that you can buy online don't have a writing sample or anything so it's hard to tell what fountain pens or even archival inks will do on a paper. The weight of a paper tells you nothing about whether it will bleed through or if there's feathering and that was all something I wanted to pay close attention to when putting my book together. I don't have a ton of pages done yet but as I'm working on it I will certainly put some up on Instagram and hopefully in like six months I'll do a flip through once I have a little bit more done in my book. So let me know if you have any questions about the book finding process or if you have made your own book what you liked or didn't like about it and I will see you soon. Thanks for watching and as always may you find peace in the sacred grove.