$5 · 32-minute video · watch anytime

This is a book made from a single sheet of watercolor paper — folded, cut, and decorated into something you can hold, flip through, and give away or keep.

The technique is called a snake book. You just need one sheet of paper, some ink, and whatever small things you’ve been collecting — buttons, ribbon, a scrap of lace, a label maker if you have one.

The supplies are beside the point. What the book ends up holding is not.

I made mine as a gratitude practice. The pages are about music, family, food, online friendships, sweater weather, spicy things. The last page says: grateful for this life. There’s a little heartbeat drawn in pen.

The book in this video has a winter feeling — it was filmed in 2021 and the context was Christmas. But a gratitude book has no season. You could make this in May. You could make it for someone who needs to be reminded what they have.

The folding is the only part that takes patience. Try it once with a scrap piece of copy paper before you commit to your good paper.

Everything else follows.