Do It Yourself Lenormand

Last week I posted about the Tarot Stones, a rather tongue-in-cheek look at the idea of converting a deck of cards into a more convenient set of tokens. For me, they are easier to carry around and I’m less worried about them getting damaged. But there is another advantage as well: you can very easily make them yourself. With Lenormand Stones, you almost have to.

I’m a big fan of the DIY (Do It Yourself) ethos. I find that there is a lot of power in making your own tools, especially very personal ones like divination sets. There are many, many different Lenormand decks on the market, but you will almost certainly connect better with a set made custom for you.

Fortunately, Lenormand is just about the perfect DIY divination system. It was designed to use simple but specific symbols to represent a variety of concepts. This isn’t like Tarot where one must choose whether to include the lion, the woman, or the lemniscate  from the Strength card. In Lenormand, the Fox is the Fox. You should probably have a prominent fox on it!

Another plus is the 36-card symbol set. You won’t have to make 78 of whatever you’re using; 36 is an easily manageable number. These reasons, which make Lenormand so easy to DIY, are also the reasons there are so many Lenormand decks on the market! They’re easier for professional artists too.

For a list of the Lenormand cards and their meanings, you can visit Learn Lenormand. This is the site I learned from. The author has a traditional way of approaching the symbol set, which I prefer. The traditional approach is what makes Lenormand different from reading Tarot; otherwise it can be done similarly.

Once you’ve got your list of symbols, you’ll need to decide what medium to use to DIY your Lenormand. I prefer the token method; I honestly love the tactile feel of little wood tokens or stones under my fingers. They’re also more portable and easier to spread out.

The pinnacle of Lenormand reading is the Grand Tableau, a spread of all 36 cards. This is really hard to do with anything other than small cards, and is made much easier with small little stones. You can even draw a grid for the Houses on a regular sized piece of printer paper to make reading the Grand Tableau simpler!

There are lots of other options too. Using index cards, you can draw your own symbols or decoupage images from magazines or printed from online. If you have access to a laminator, they’ll look beautiful and stand up for years. If you can get your hands on a scanner or a nice camera, you can make images of your cards that can be printed by any number of printing companies. The Game Crafter is really easy to use, but there are several companies out there that will help you out.

No matter how you choose to do it, making your own Lenormand set will help you better understand the method. It will also give you a personal connection to the symbols that will make it easier to read. Enjoy!