Commonplace Grimoire Guide Introduction

   Merry Meet!

    Welcome my friends to the Heartland Hedge Witch's Grimoire Guide. My goal with this blog is to give a step by step guide for setting up a Grimoire in a Commonplace Book style. If you're new to the idea of a Commonplace book, the basic concept is that you have a single book where you can keep all of your ideas - quotes, poems, recipes, and ideas from other books are typical Commonplace Book entries. Now, imagine that you have that same kind of book, but it's designed to keep all of your witchy knowledge including spells, correspondences, and more.

 Typically, grimoires are designed to be completed in sections with all of the information on a single topic grouped together, but we witches are learning more every day and that makes keeping an organized grimoire a bit more difficult. Some witches opt to section off their blank books in advance, allocating a certain number of pages to each section while others prefer using a binder system so they can add to or take away from at any time. These systems work fabulously for some people, and I am in no way discounting those systems if they work for you, but merely giving a different option.

    The benefit of the Commonplace system are that you can add to your book at any time. The books themselves are typically smaller (the book that I'm using as an example throughout this blog is an A5 size, 5.83x8.27 inches, and fits nicely in my bag so that I can keep it with me. By design a Commonplace Book is meant to be added to without rhyme or reason, entries are added as information is gathered. This may sound like it's completely unorganized, but quite the opposite is true. Instead of organizing your material based on a table of contents, you're actually organizing your table of contents based on the information. This allows for a much more natural flow, but also allows you to keep your information easy to find. Also, though completely not required, my Commonplace Book system provides color coding that helps make information topics easy to find at a glance.

    I encourage you to try this system, even as a stepping stone for adding information into your larger grimoire, a process we'll explore more in the future. For now, I ask that you grab a cup of tea and cozy up and learn more about the process and see if it's right for you.

Blessed Be,
JenMarie