Five Witches Have Arrived | Handmade Halloween Junk Journals
🕯️ For Those Who Prefer Their Halloween a Little Haunted
There is Halloween that is bright orange pumpkins, smiling ghosts and bowls overflowing with candy.
And then there is the other Halloween.
The one that lives somewhere between the last light of afternoon and the moment you realize the room has gone dark.
The Halloween of old houses and black lace. Fortune tellers and apothecary labels. Strange family photographs. Ravens. Witches. Things tucked inside envelopes marked OPEN IF YOU DARE.
That is the Halloween I keep coming back to.
And apparently, when left unsupervised in my studio, it is also the Halloween that ends up inside my journals.
A Journal Should Have Secrets
One of my favourite things about a handmade journal is that you don't have to understand it all at once.
Actually, I rather prefer that you don't.
I love making journals with layers and hiding places. Envelopes that need opening. Tags tucked behind things. Translucent papers that only give you a shadow of what is coming next.
A little lace escaping from the edge.
A scrap of something old.
Something clipped to a page that looks as though perhaps it wasn't originally meant to be there.
There should always be the possibility that you missed something the first time through.
For the Nyctophiliacs
I included the word nyctophilia in one of these journals:
Love of darkness or night, finding relaxation or comfort in the darkness.
There are people who see October getting darker and think, How depressing.
And then there are the rest of us.
We notice the earlier sunset. We turn on a little lamp. Perhaps light a candle. Make something warm to drink. Put on an old spooky movie and become inexplicably delighted that the trees outside the window are beginning to look slightly ominous.
I suspect these journals are for those people.
They aren't really about being frightened.
They're about the delicious possibility of being frightened.
Open if You Dare!
A fortune teller's sign.
A bat on an envelope.
An old photograph that makes you wonder who the person was.
A message telling you to open something only if you dare.
Naturally, you open it.
We aren't that sensible.
Paper That Feels As Though It Has Lived Before
One reason I love old and aged papers so much is that perfect paper doesn't tell you anything.
A page that is crinkled, stained, torn or softened around the edges already seems to have had a life.
These journals are filled with a mixture of papers, pockets, envelopes, tags, scraps, old book pages, translucent pieces, stitching, lace and odd little fragments I've collected or made.
Some pages are quiet.
Others have clearly had an incident. 😂
I like the two together.
I don't want every inch filled. A journal needs places for you to arrive.
A photograph. A ticket. A note about something that happened. A Halloween memory. A strange little treasure you found and couldn't possibly throw away.
Eventually the things I put into the journal begin living beside the things you put into it.
And then it isn't simply something I made anymore.
A Little Bit Macabre Never Hurt Anyone
Well.
Perhaps Edgar Allan Poe would disagree.
There are coffins and gravestones tucked into these journals. Ancestors of questionable origin. Witches of varying dispositions. Ghostly women. Ravens. Skulls. Black cats.
And quite a lot of people who appear to have recently heard something unfortunate behind them.
I love that kind of Halloween imagery.
Not gruesome.
Not horrifying.
Just wonderfully, theatrically macabre.
The sort of spooky that belongs to creaking floorboards, old black-and-white horror movies, dusty attics and the suspicion that somebody may have just walked past the doorway.
Five Witches Have Been Waiting in the Studio
Each one begins with the same wonderfully stern witch on the cover, but inside they wander off in their own directions.
No two are identical.
They are substantial, wonderfully unruly handmade books filled with pages to explore, places to write, pockets to investigate and plenty of room for someone else's story to begin.
Perhaps that is why I still love them so much.
They feel a little like objects that have already had a history.
As though they were discovered rather than made.
And maybe they have simply been sitting in the studio waiting for the right person to find them.
Something Wicked This Way Comes
I don't think Halloween has to be one particular thing.
It can be pumpkins and candy and ridiculous plastic skeletons.
It can also be old photographs and ghost stories and black lace and the strange comfort of turning off most of the lights.
Mine tends to contain a little of both.
But given the choice between perfectly polished and slightly haunted...
I think we all know which door I'm opening.
Even if it says OPEN IF YOU DARE.
Come Visit the Haunted Desk
If this happens to be your particular flavour of Halloween, a few of these strange little books are currently waiting in the Haunted Desk at ila & alice, along with spooky paper goods, photographs, ephemera and other curious things from my studio.
Come have a look. You never know what might be waiting in the drawer.
Lisa xo
ila & alice
