The Handmaid Grimoire: A Review

Can you guess what my favorite part of being a witch is? It’s the craft itself. Writing spells, dressing candles, and just all around creating. That’s because in addition to being a witch, I’m an artist at my core. If it can be considered art, I’ve likely dabbled in it. Traditional, musical, theatrical, culinary, literary. I make jewelry, write poetry, produce animation, draw bones, sew garments, and so much more.  I love breathing life into simple objects by infusing them with my time, energy, passion, and whatever emotion it needs from me. I genuinely believe that there is nothing more satisfying than having something tangible

that represents all the heart and soul you’ve poured into the world.

As such, I really love physical things. Sure, e-readers, streaming platforms, and the Cloud are fantastic resources for keeping your space uncluttered while still accessing a large amount of data, but I find it also removes a lot of the personality, the presence a physical version of the objects could be instilling into your home. After all, sharing your latest book binge just isn’t the same on Kindle. There’s truly something magical about that moment when you friend loans you their favorite book, spine cracked and pages curled from hours of losing oneself into words. And sure, it’s more convenient to have a word doc with all your family recipes, but it'll never feel like an heirloom the way a fraying and fading recipe card with bits of dried batter in the margins do. Connection with the material world will always have a larger impact on me than the digital world ever could. It’s why I only read physical books, write almost everything down before typing it out , and prefer the messiness of art supplies over the convenience of a drawing tablet. Hell, I still buy CDs and DVDs for my favorite music and movies, even thought I have Netflix and Spotify.

So, what does any of this have to do with witchcraft? Why should it matter that I have an artist brain and need to collect pretty things that call out to me? Its because every area of my life and personality bleed into one another. I am an artist in everything I do, just like I am a witch in everything I do, just like I am a chaos goblin in everything I do. As I walk my path as a witch, I do my best to incorporate my artistic passions into my tools, my magic, and of course, my grimoire. I am especially always looking for new ways to make my grimoire more interactive and more fun as a way to make my craft, well… craftier. I’ve lost count of the hours looking up references on Pinterest, buying fun stickers and cardstock, and testing out calligraphy styles. After all, my grimoire isn’t just a compilation of information I’ve gathered, but a compilation of my energy, my passions, and my creativity. That’s why the discovery of The Handmade Grimoire intrigued me so.

The Handmade Grimoire by Laura Derbyshire

Laura Derbyshire offers a simple exploration of what a grimoire is and what a grimoire can be. She defines a grimoire, how to choose a journal for yours, and how to infuse it with magic. Her book also adventures into the realm of creativity, presenting ideas to add some whimsy to your spreads as well as how to develop the right mindset when it comes to finding and foraging items to include in its pages. To aid you in your magic making, Laura gifts the reader with some beautifully decorated pages for you to craft into your grimoire.

You can expect…

• Spells to infuse your grimoire with magic

• Crafty ideas to beautify your grimoire

• Lots and lots of crafting paper

The Review

The artist in me loves special details in books, like sprayed edges or foiled hard covers. Naturally, I was delighted to see this book was printed on lusciously thick paper, with full color illustrations decorating the pages. More goes into the experience of reading a book than just the words written within. Every painted flower, every sketched animal, and every brush of color helps create a whole new world for the reader, and leaves you wondering what enchantments lay on the next page. However, enchantment quickly shifted to confusion as I noticed the art abruptly dominating the pages. In a roughly 140-page book, only the first 70 or so pages have any actual readable content. The entire second half of the book was just decorated pages, like the crafting paper pads you can find a Michaels or a paper crafting store. The pages with writing on them don’t always cover the entire page either, so in reality, there’s probably only about 30 to 40 of pages to read through. This genuinely upset me a bit. I purchased this book online and wasn’t able to properly flip through the pages to get an idea of what I was getting. So, when I bought a book to read and discovered a significant lack of words, I felt cheated. It felt like false advertising to call it a 140-page book when in reality it’s a 70-page book with 70 inserts. Not every book I pick up is what I expect it to be, but I still expect any book I pick up to actually be a book. I likely wouldn’t have brought this home if I had skimmed the pages in a store.

Let’s go back a bit though and look at the writing that is found in the book; unfortunately, I was again a little disappointed, as nothing was super detailed. The introduction boasts the author’s years of experience experimenting with tools, technic, and textiles, but fails to deliver on all the knowledge you would assume she has. With the exception of pens, she doesn’t really get specific about what tools you can or should use. Sure, she’ll generally outline that you can use stamps, paint, and other fairly ambiguous categories of tools, but she never gets into anything too specific. I want to know what situations are better to use parchment vs craft paper, rubber stamps v silicone stamps, etc. In what situations would I want to consider a spiral bound sketchbook over a leather-bound notebook? What are the pros and cons of using paint pens instead of brush and acrylic? I was just left wanting. I wanted to hear what her favorite brands of art supplies are, about her biggest blunder in her grimoire, the technic that took her the longest to master and what mistakes she made along to way. I wanted this book to be her masterclass on grimoire crafting. Again, she mentions so often about her many years of trials and tribulations to use different tools and mediums, how they would affect her grimoire, and yet she shares very little of these discoveries with the reader.

Unsure, find something fun to put here

Another thing she attempts to do is encourage the reader to actually be inspired and just create in their grimoire. I agree with her that sometimes the fear of not being able to deliver on your vision for your grimoire can be debilitating, but you just need to jump in and try anyways. She also tries really hard not to scare the reader, encouraging you to be playful and try things out. Her efforts actually had an adverse effect on me, as she encourages you to dedicate 10 – 60 mins a day to your grimoire, multiple times a week, until your grimoire is full. A fun fact about myself: I am chronically overbooked. Between working a full-time job, running a business, curling once a week, maintaining my home, honoring social commitments, and various other obligations, I’m lucky to have the energy to sit through an episode or two of my favorite show at the end of the day without falling asleep. An hour a day, 3 days a week, is a really big ask for me. I envy anyone who has an hour a day, multiple times a week, to dedicate towards a hobby like that. On the other hand, 10 minutes a day doesn’t feel like enough time to really get in a groove to produce sometime I’m happy with. I can’t even keep a daily or even weekly journal where I just tick off things like how much water I drank or if I did any exercise, so the idea that I should be in my grimoire multiple times a week until it’s full was unbelievable overwhelming for me. I’m more of a “wait for a free weekend and do nothing but fill my grimoire” kind of girly. Which means that I’ve been working on my main grimoire since 2021 and I’ve only just reached the halfway point a couple of weeks ago. Laura’s dedication to her grimoire is admirable, but simply unrealistic for myself.

The one part of this book that I thought was really well put together was the explanation on how to start. From things to consider when choosing your grimoire, to different ways to infuse magic into it, I found the information to be pretty good. I have a lot of friends who suffer from perfectionism: if they don’t think they can execute it perfectly on the first go, they don’t even start to try. I think if any of them were scared of starting a grimoire wrong, this book might help them overcome that performance anxiety of getting started. To be honest, when I picked up this book, I worried that it was be all papercraft tips and no rituals, so I was happy to see cleansing, sigils and other magic in this book. Her suggestions mostly align with advice I would give out if someone asked me how to start their grimoire. However, there was one idea I very much disagreed with. While my permanent altar to Hekate is above the bookshelf I keep my grimoire on, I do not consider my altar to have the same energy as my grimoire. My altar is in honor of Hekate and therefore is filled with her energy. My grimoire is in honor of my magic, my practice. It is a melting pot of all my chaotic thoughts and energies. Even my working altar, which I only dress up for ritual, should only have the energy I’m calling upon for that specific ritual. My grimoire is not an energetic mirror of my altar, nor would I want it to be. 

Piles of pretty paper, scissors, and washi tape

I also liked the Ideas For Inside section. The ideas put forward are clearly outlined; options are presented along with why you might want to try them, and I even learned a trick or two. In fact, I found a lot of the creative ideas in this book to be quite interesting. I’ve thought of what an artist’s grimoire might look like, but while reading I was started to debate creating a sewing grimoire (sewing is one of my favorite hobbies and I’m always looking for ways to infuse it into my craft.) I love that she talks about creating spinning wheels and envelopes, adding tags and fabric, dying paper with tea or coffee… I especially loved hearing her admit she uses bones in her practice. However, for everything I loved, I couldn’t help but feel like this was the wrong setting to receive this information. I didn’t feel like it fit nicely into a book, and started wishing this were a guided journal instead. My expectations for a journal are different than they are for a book, so a lot of the criticism I had for it wouldn’t have felt like such a big deal in a journal. It would also have given the reader a place to practice all the ideas she suggests, almost turning the journal into a practice grimoire that I wouldn’t feel bad about cutting up and making ugly. As it stands, I will likely never use the beautiful pages at the end, since it would break my heart to carve up a book like that.

Overall, this book was not for me. I like to reread books, and with my witchcraft books especially, I like to go back to them over and over to reference material or get inspiration, and I just don’t see myself doing that with this one. While I like that she includes ideas to infuse your grimoire with magic, they all feel like relatively obvious choices. I found her creative and crafty ideas to be a little less obvious, but not enough to feel like the pages are bursting with inspiration for me. There’s no learned knowledge that is shared despite all of her familiarity with various tools and technics, and I can’t understand why she didn’t compile them into this book. It feels like a missed opportunity. While her craft my not be all about the aesthetic, I do feel like this book is design for someone who’s craft maybe is. And if that’s your jam, great! This is the book for you. But I desperately wanted to either feel like I learned something or was inspired to create, and this book fell flat on both points for me.