Witch Crafts: Cord Cutting Journal 
with Brenda Roswess

I'm Brenda and welcome to Witch Crafts where we get into the magic of making. I'm the assistant shop manager at HausWitch, and I graduated from Montserrat College of Art in 2015 with my degree in book arts. So, I've always felt like a Book Witch. Paper has been my special ritual tool for a long time. 

Today we're making a cord cutting journal, just like the one that's in the All Hallows Eve spell kit. It's a really simple three hole pamphlet binding, and you can use it for anything else in the future. You can make your own little journals and you can repeat the cord cutting process for a million different things. This spell we are doing it for harmful patterns that are sitting in our ancestral line that we're ready to let go of.

For materials that you're going to need: 
- a 4 x 6 inch piece of cover paper, so anything that's just a little thicker than what you're going to put inside. Even if you don't have that it's perfectly fine if it's plain paper, but if you want it can be fun to decorate it and do something that feels appropriate for the spell
- and then you'll need 3 pieces of 4 x 6 inch paper that's going to go on the inside. Anything works. If you want another optional thing to do to make an extra cute and put your own special magic into it is to make one side decorative and leave the other side blank so that you can write on it later. 
-you'll need some thick thread and a needle
-a pair of scissors 
-and optional but useful are an awl, which is just a little tool that you can poke things with
-and a bone folder, which is just for folding. You can also just use your nail to really like press it down and get good creases. 

Now that we have our materials all gathered together, we're going to take our paper, of course, and put the cover on the outside (we all know that, we have books). You're gonna take it and fold it in. If you have a bone folder you can pass it down with, or you can just use your mail to really rub it down and get a good crease. 

And then you're going to open up the book so that you can see the inside crease. And you're going to punch three holes, one that goes in the middle one that's going to go a quarter of an inch away from the edge. And then another that goes a quarter inch away from the other edge. 

And now that you have your three holes, you're ready to start sewing. So, now that you're ready to sew, you're going to start with your needle and go through the outside middle hole into the inside. And it's fine if you leave about six inches on the outside tail. That's going to be the cord that you're going to cut as you're working your spell. So, after you've gone in through the middle, you're going to go through one of the outer holes, either one is totally fine. Pull that tight. And then skip the middle hole, and from the outside go back in. Go through the other outer hole all the way through. And now you're gonna go back through the middle. Now that you're gonna have two threads going through the middle hole what you want to do is split both threads between the thread that's binding in between it.  It just makes your binding tighter, it looks nice, it's easier to tie it off. And now that that part's totally tied, you're just going to tie it off with a simple square knot, which you all tighten shoes. Just loop around once and then twice. 

And now that you have the basic binding, you're going to add your knots for your spell. And for this spell in particular we went with five knots, because there are five spreads in the book, and book nerd vocab: “spreads” are essentially two pages that are next to each other so it's kind of like that vast open space you get when you flip a page open. So you're just gonna make a knot here, however you do it is totally fine. I can do that through just simple knots. You kind of get really creative and witchy and if you know interesting knot tying things or were a scout in your childhood you can definitely play with the knots you add and the symbolism for them. And while you're done knotting, you can just go ahead and trim some of the access at the end. And you have your cord cutting journal.

So at this point, you're ready to do the spell. And the basis of the spell is pretty simple, you're really just going to be using this journal to work through whatever energies you're trying to release. In the case of the All Hallows Eve spell we’re releasing unhelpful energies in our family line and we sort of looked at it from a scope of thinking about the Elements. So you're going to work through Earth, Air, Fire, Water, and for the witches, Spirit, to remove each part, slowly, and let that go. 

So as you're going, you're going to be filling out your spread. Writing, whatever feels helpful to lay out and whatever you're asking the universe for help releasing whatever you think is going to serve and everybody's highest good. 

And then as you're finished you snip, your thread, put it in some fire and burn it. You can have your fire going the whole time and go one by one or you could wait until the very end, when the book is totally unbound and burn it all together. You can also experiment since you're doing this spell at home. If burning doesn't feel appropriate for you, or if you don't have the tools for it, bury it. Or, you could release it in water (maybe get a jar). 

I'll see you again for the next witchcraft. Have fun making all your magic with this. You're definitely going to have plenty to do and you can do it over and over again with so many different energies that are ready to be released, or you can just make your own cute little book of spells. 

Have fun, witches!

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