Book Of Shadows....

So this is my online archive for my Book of Shadows but I do have a physical one I am making and there is a lot of debate on what you can and cannot do. For example, some sources will tell you that your BOS has to be hand written. If you are in a coven and your coven dictates that it must be hand written then you should probably follow those rules.
If you're a solitary practitioner then you should already know you have your own rules and can do whatever you feel is best.

Part of the argument on why your book of shadows entries should be hand written is that it embeds part of you with the pages - that you form an unbreakable bond with them. I am not sure how your book of shadows is - handwritten or handmade or on a computer, ect but I have certainly bonded with my pages.

I have spent hours upon hours and hundreds of dollars on supplies, gathering information from different sources, ect. Not to mention that I have spent hours upon hours coffee and tea staining my pages and then painting them and putting them together in my post-bound book. You can't tell me I haven't bonded with my pages. My sweat, tears (literally) and blood (figuratively) have gone into this book. To say I haven't bounded with it would be to say that I put no effort into its contents, its fruition and quite frankly that is insulting! Same to be said with my sharing it on the internet. I still spent hours collecting data, I've spent hours working on the design and on the posts.

So I am going to share with you some pictures of what my book of shadows looks like. There is also going to be a part of a disclaimer here - This is MY BOOK for my PERSONAL USE. I do not profit monetarily from any of the information that is contained in these pages and never will. A lot of it is borrowed from other sources. Sources that I do not have cited in my book because again it is for me. I know what information is mine and what isn't and as I said I use that information for me just the same as I would from the original source.

Anyways, on with the show part of this show-and-tell. This is "it" and "it" will never be "finished" so I guess pardon the mess?

So this was when I was staining my pages. The page on the left was the very first one I had done and the one on the right was the last one I did with the same bag of tea. There is an extreme difference in the color and texture and I have done a lot of reading on the process before and after and no one can say why this happened. One person theorized that the tea had cooled and that made a difference or that there was less of the juices in the teabag. 

Full Cup O Tea for staining. Also, that's a tea bag in coffee. I was trying to combine both to see if it would change the color of the pages. It didn't really help.

Blurry picture but this was after I had put tea on them a second time and baked them. I also crumpled the page on the right to see if that made a difference in the staining.

This is a side-by-side comparison of the different techniques I used. Tea only on the left, coffee only in the middle and a combo on the right. They all look the same to me darn it!

Different types of tea stain different colors. For example, I used black tea for all my pages and then I went over the symbol on this page with Tazo passion fruit tea because of the ingredients in it.

This is my book blessing page. I purchased some special scrapbook paper for this and then burned the edges using a candle and a damp wash cloth (to wipe the edges when and if they caught fire). If you do burn the edges of your paper PLEASE use caution. Do it in the shower (make sure you turn on a fan) or over a sink. I don't recommend outside because of wind or if you live in a dry area you could make it into a much bigger thing.

Another reason I like the post bound scrapbook - I can open the pages flat if I need to. The page protectors do what they are supposed to and protect my pages from spills - the unintentional ones!

This page took me about 20 minutes to paint with watercolor. I love water color for my pages because the colors turn out just right and I can use the brown to stain the pages and give them more depth or if I miss a spot I can cover it up. This is a faerie drawing I found online that was black and white. I then painted it and brought the fae to life on my page. I definitely bonded with it since I used Full Moon Blessed water to paint with. The bottom design is my own little creation. I have been doing that same little squiggly design for years. I just kept doing it and told the fae to tell me when to stop.

Athena is my favorite of the Goddesses so I have a special page dedicated to her with the basic information on her. Her nicknames and other names, her story of how she was born, her story with Medusa, how she battled her uncle for the right to Athens and then I found a painting/sketch online that someone did of Athena and her owl and loved it so much that I replicated it in my page on her.

Like I said, my book is never finished. Here I have the runes index but as you can see the pages are not stained yet and I have not painted in the runes, which I do plan on doing after I stain them. (Don't want to smudge the paint).

And so that is a brief look at my book of shadows and some of the actual pages. I have about 100 pages I still need to add - my index on herbs and stones as well as more information on other Gods and Goddesses, Familiars, ect that I want in there and then of course my spells!