Tarot and crafting

[flamingsword]

I am now stalled out on both the current projects due to lack of spoons today, so I’m thinking of taking an old unicorn tarot that nobody wants and drawing my own words and such on the cards to create a completely different oracle. I just need some sort of overarching paradigm for it. I have the zen cards which are very “you should meditate about that” and the Future Vision Steven Universe tarot that is “you should do therapy about that”. So I guess I need a “do your self care and community care work” deck.

If the deck is going to be four suits and a major arcana (big if) then the suits would have to be:
Major arcana - infrastructure and anti-capitalism
Coins - community care
Swords - restorative justice
Wands - social justice
Cups - self care
Or those are my current thoughts on how to do this.

What are projects that you have decided against or abandoned this year? Anyone have an egg-on-my-face story?

[Edit to add: I talked myself into it, and now have the We Live In A Society deck of vaguely tarot-ish cards. Now I just need to get used to them.]

Comments

[ex_flameandsong751]

I have a friend who's been making a Silmarillion Tarot for personal use and while I don't do Tarot anymore, I still enjoy the artwork she's shown me, it's very nice.

I like the idea of a social justice/self-care themed deck.

The main thing I abandoned this year was a GOT/Silm crossover with Brienne meeting Fingon, Maglor and Maedhros, because at the time I felt overwhelmed by too many projects [I now have more projects going than I did when I abandoned it, but at the time I had less ability to handle multiple projects] and also it was going to get too fucking sad, with replaying canon character death of Fingon and Fingolfin and I wasn't in the mood for that and didn't feel like trying to rework the story since so much of it was about Brienne dealing with Maglor and Maedhros's PTSD. [I also decided that an AFAB person doing emotional labor for two cis guys was not a great look, even though my intent was "non-binary not-conventionally-attractive person hooks up with hot guys", intent is not magic, etc.]

There's other stuff I thought I would get to this year but haven't gotten a chance to because my two big longfic WIPs have taken up so much of my time. One of those is done and I'm just sitting on the final chapters to post them in November and December, but I don't even know if I've recomped enough mental bandwidth to work on a short multichap as a self-indulgent birthday present to myself next month, never mind trying to start another major project before the year is over. [I might do like 1-2 chapters of a new WIP before year's end, knowing me, but I won't really be able to dig my teeth into it till next year.]

I am perpetually in WIP hell and to-do list hell, and I complain about it, the same way a lot of crafty people swear at their knitting or their painting, etc.

[flamingsword]

Any kind of Tolkien tarot sounds like it would be a beautiful thing.

I hope you do wind up having the mental bandwidth to do the things you enjoy, bc I feel you on the not having enough energy for stuff. All I’ve done today is perseverate on cards and it was slow going bc brains. But maybe tomorrow will be better for both of us.

[flamingsword]

I also decided that an AFAB person doing emotional labor for two cis guys was not a great look,

Yeah, this is one of the things I didn’t like about the whole Agender!Female!Captain America thing I was writing, like giving someone a uterus meant I would have to do the socially-mandated thing with that fictional uterus? I don’t even do that with my own uterus! Which is why I just noped out of the whole thing rather than going back and doing a full re-write.

[chemicalcain]

Oh, this is an interesting idea! I've been thinking for a while about ways to vary my tarot readings, so maybe I'll try to incorporate new suits representing different aspects of community.

I almost backed the Alleyman's Tarot when it was on Kickstarter, because the idea of a mix-and-match deck is really compelling to me, but eventually I decided I can just do that myself over time. I'll just have to keep looking for more decks, and there are worse fates than getting more pretty cards, haha.

I also saw @wandmakers on TikTok making their own tarot cards out of garbage. Cutting labels out of boxes and bags and turning them into collage cards following the common major/minor arcana suits. I think it's incredibly cool.

[flamingsword]

A friend of mine has the alleyman’s tarot, and she has not used it because it’s too easy to get decision paralysis trying to choose between that many moving pieces. And it’s not like you can shuffle the 2.5 decks worth of cards all together, so you kind of need to pick a different way of reading for those cards.

The art is beautiful though.