Making a Grand Tableau Mat

I've been dreaming of the Ciro Marchetti Grand Tableau cloth available from his website, ever since I saw Donnaleigh de LaRose use it in one of her amazing video tutorials. As I worked my way into practicing with this massive spread, I realized that I needed some kind of mat with the Houses all situated. The Marchetti cloth is beautiful, but also a bit over my budget for now, so I decided to take an idea from yet another of Donnaleigh's videos, and use some printer paper to create my own mat. Durable? Not so much..!  But it serves the purpose very well, and for practicing it's perfect!

First I dug out some printer paper. I lined some cards up on a single sheet so I could see the best fit, and then I lightly traced the cards out with a pencil. Then I put the cards away and retraced the pencil lines with a Sharpie. For following pieces of paper I just laid a new piece of paper over the original, and traced the Sharpie lines that were visible:

That took five sheets of paper (I did the mat in the 8x4 +4 structure). Then I wrote the House and number on each card spot, and lined all the pages up to make sure they matched up with each other:

Finally it was time to try out a Grand Tableau! (Not for the faint of heart!!)

Grand Tableau with Gilded Reverie Lenormand

I expect that eventually I'll have to replace the paper mat, though for now I'm storing it in pieces in a folder for safe keeping.  But it took only about twenty minutes to create, and it's really invaluable!