Well, I have continued making tarot cards!
So, I kinda stopped trading cards after a while, I had plenty and just felt like I was done. But I hadn't had a crafty project in a while and I'd had the thought before that I'd like to physically make a whole deck for myself, after discovering how much I liked making cards. And I decided I wanted to call it my Thrifted Tarot, and make it entirely out of things I got from the thrift store, nothing purchased new.
So a few weekends ago I decided to hit some thrift stores and pick up some books to make cards with. It took a few rounds, I think I ended up with working from about 10 books, but I was able to find artwork for all 78 cards, along with one bonus card because I like to add bonuses as sort of my own signature on a deck I created.
Everything was thrifted or second hand except for the glue I used to glue things together and the pens I ended up using for the titles, but those don't count, things like glue and pens are outside of the rules.
I don't have any pictures of the process of making the cards, because it's the same as it was before and it's pretty simple.
I cut out the images I liked, cut them down to a little larger than tarot card sized and glued them to cardstock. The glue was just a Krylon brand spray adhesive I bought at Michael's. I hate working with spray adhesive, it's so sticky and messy, but I've found it's the best way to evenly glue down pictures cut from book pages to avoid the paper wrinkling. The cardstock I used was from packs of greeting cards I bought from the thrift store as well, I find that greeting card cardstock has the perfect thickness for tarot cards, thick enough to be sturdy, but not ridiculously thick.
I backed the cards with a black marble pattern contact paper I had left over from recovering the surface of a Craigslist desk I bought for my kid. That also involved cutting out roughly tarot sized rectangles, pulling the backing off slightly at the top, sticking it to the top edge of the glued picture/cardstock and then slowly smoothing the contact paper down as I continued peeling the backing off. That made sure I didn't get bubbles.
For trimming, I used my Fiskars guillotine paper cutter to cut the top edge of each card straight and even, and then I could line up the top edge at the top of the cutter and get a straight 90 degree angle down the right side of the card. To get them to the correct size after that and make them all the same size I would take a tarot card and push it up against the lowered blade, and then tape a ruler to the cutter on the other side to mark exactly how long I wanted it to be, basically just like I did when trimming borders off of other decks previously. That allowed me to get the cards all almost exactly the same size.
It's also important to do this one side at a time, I positioned the ruler for the bottom edge and then cut the bottom edge on every card so that I was cutting the same size every time because the ruler never moved. Then just reposition for the left side of the card. I did find that I had to cut a little more off the right side in some places just for positioning so the image didn't end up off center by cutting more off the left than the right. But it worked. I did have a few mistakes where I wasn't careful enough and over-trimmed, so I actually had to replace a few cards because they were just too far off from the other cards.
The rounded corners were just done with a corner rounding punch, nothing fancy.
I struggled with the card titles. First of all, there's the fear of the writing or paint or whatever wearing off over time. I already knew from the cards I'd made before that I couldn't use my Zig calligraphy pens or even sharpie, those would wear off. After asking people in my tarot crafting group and trying a few things, I learned that my best options were a multisurface paint pen, a Copic marker or a Tombow marker.
The paint pen had clearest lines, and an opaque silver color I would need for cards with mostly dark colors, but was the easiest to scratch. (Not EASY easy, it was very resilient, but by comparison.) The Copic was nice and dark, had no silver, but was less easy to damage than the paint pen. The Tombow was apparently bulletproof and undamageable, but it also had no opaque silver and had a much more faded color, it wasn't nearly as bold. Plus it was a brush pen which would have made writing more challenging with my lack of calligraphy experience. In the end I chose the paint pen, the opaque silver was what tipped the scale. I also figured I'd give the cards a protective top coat anyways, which would help reduce the risk of scratching off.
And, for the record, by "scratching off", I mean I tested these markers on scraps cut from the books and then WENT AT THEM with my thumbnail, quite roughly and violently TRYING to destroy the writing, which is not how much damage these cards will be subject to. I just wanted to be sure.
The second issue I had with the titles is my handwriting. I have awful handwriting, and I've hated it my whole life. A high school english teacher once charitably described it as "My thoughts just go too fast for my hand to keep up." I describe it as a drunken spider staggering through a pool of ink. But as I thought about it, maybe my handwriting was exactly the "font" this deck needed? Rough and unpolished, you could say it was just what I had "lying around." So I decided to not even try to make it super neat, just readable, and then let it be what it was. Which was super challenging as I started writing the titles and my insecure brain insisted LOUDLY that the cards looked better before I added my messy scribbles, but I ignored it.
I intend to edge the deck as well, I think, but I haven't committed to that yet, we'll see what I think when I really start working with it.
For the top coat I had a can of PYM II, a clear spray specifically intended to preserve things like pictures, newspaper articles or, dare I say, book pages. I had bought it because it's also recommended for polymer clay and I intended to use it for my wine glasses but I ended up wanting a shinier finish so I hadn't really used it. After giving the handwritten titles a full 24 hours to make sure the paint pen had a chance to cure, I then gave the cards a very thorough top coat of PYM II. It wasn't necessary to coat the backs, the contact paper is vinyl-ish so it doesn't need sealing. The spray gave the cards a faintly dusty texture, but didn't add any gloss, which was what I wanted. There were a few places where the spray can dripped on the cards so there's a little shiny spot, but it's not really noticeable, and the whole theme of this deck is that it is what it is, so whatever.
After that cured for another 24 hours, the cards were done and I could put them in their box. I will go into the box in a moment, but first I'm gonna give you a break from all my babbling with a massive image dump. Here's the deck!
Okay, I could try to arrange those more neatly, but honestly, arranging pictures on this site is a fucking chore, so you get a single column and that's just the way it is.
If youre curious: I've kind of had a hard time nailing down the meaning for The Portal, but I knew the card felt right in this deck when I looked at it. Basically my thought is an awareness of something beyond your understanding, other worlds you could reach if you just step through the portal. It's opening your mind to other possibilities and then stepping forward to experience them, connecting with something beyond what you can see or touch. Recognizing that existence is more than this one moment and we are all progressing to a portal to something else. The eternal journey of the soul, something like that. It's a card I can feel, but it's kinda hard to put in words.
I'm also very proud of the box, so let's talk about that. A while back my boyfriend's parents were selling their house, and so they were offloading on us a lot of the old stuff of his they were holding onto. We went through it, weeded out what we didn't want and finding storage for the stuff he wanted to keep. One of the things we found was a lovely wooden box that looked like it had once held a watch, and once the foam inserts were removed, was basically exactly tarot sized. For a long time I didn't have a deck to keep in it, but when this came up it was too perfect.
There were only a few small hitches. First, the deck was a little too thick, so I needed to make the interior like, a quarter of an inch taller, which luckily the lid had clearance for. I also kinda wanted to cover the inside of the lid because it had the watch company logo on it and I didn't want that visible. So basically I took some posterboard I had in my craft supplies, cut it to fit inside the box perfectly and covered it in this black satin fabric from my fabric stash leftover from a robe I made myself and then glued it inside the box. I could have done a few things differently to make it a little neater but all in all I'm happy with how it turned out, it holds the deck like it was meant for it.
The box didn't originally have a clasp either. Now, I knew I could buy a clasp for it, I've done it before, but that goes against the thrifted theme of this deck. So back to the thrift store I went. I managed to find a little Minnie Mouse pencil tin that I just mangled to remove the clasp and then glued to this box with E6000, seems pretty secure so far.
All in all I kept to my all thrifted theme and I also feel like my messy handwriting kind of ties the deck together instead of just being a collection of random images. I'm really happy with the art I found, and I can't wait to work with the deck. I had a bunch of leftover images I had pulled out as possible cards and since I was having so much fun I ended up turning those into cards as well and making an oracle deck, but I'll post that later. There's enough images in this post.
