Deck Review: The Craft Felt Tarot

It’s a lovely, bright, sunshiney day in Southsea, so it seems like a good day to review this lovely, bright, sunshiney deck – The Craft Felt Tarot by crafter and creator Gianna Lucci. The Craft Felt Tarot is a 78-card deck made from photographs of the creator’s original craft felt designs. The texturing and brightness of the images is really amazing – I can’t believe I’m not holding something 3D (well, I mean, obviously I technically am holding something 3D, it’s just a very flat 3D thing, whereas it feels like it should be a fully chonky 3D thing, so, you know what I mean 😂…) The colours are SO bold and joyous that they sing off the cardstock. And it feels like you should be able to reach out a finger and touch the fuzz of the felt, so realistic is the rendering. Lucci explains that the project “began with a simple thought I had one day while pulling a few tarot cards…. ‘I wish the Death card was a little….softer‘”, and the whole deck is exactly this, soft and warm and welcoming, like a hug with your favourite (slightly prescient) teddy bear.

The cards are based on the RWS*, and are easy to follow. Lucci explains that she “wanted the designs to have a certain simplicity and ease for beginners, yet also retain and point to the traditional complexities for advanced readers. Mostly though, I wanted to make a deck that brought joy to the user” – and I’d say she has 100% achieved this! My one (small) criticism, which I appreciate is quite specific to weird little idiosyncratic me, is that some cards are straightforward RWS clones (but in felt, obvs) and others are more modern riffs on the card’s main theme/idea. I like both RWS clones and re-writes, but sometimes the mixture is a bit jarring – overall I think I prefer it when a deck does one thing or the other in a consistent manner.

The Deck: Look, Feel, and Finish

The deck comes in a well-made rigid box. Cards are standard Tarot sized, and super glossy, which adds to the bright shininess of the kaleidoscope of colourful images, but does make them a bit of a PITA to stack as they’re slippery little suckers. They’re pretty lightweight cards, too. I don’t think they’ll warp – they’re kind of elastic-y unlike those thin and brittle ones that bend over time – but I could do with them being a bit more robust (especially given there’s such a high standard of finish to the box and the LWB). There is a small, sturdy colour guidebook, which features a haiku for each card, which, as you can imagine, I am *here* for! 💛Any readers of this blog will know that Tarot cards + poetry = my jam.

Greatest Hits: My Favourite Cards from The Craft Felt Tarot

I am always a fan of a preggo Empress, and I like this one relaxing beneath her verdant pomegranate tree. The pomegranate red and green of her hair, and the apples of her cheeks, create a really pleasing visual theme of colours and shapes throughout the card. I also like it when a deck puts pomegranates front and centre for Empress cards (and High Priestess cards, for that matter). Rich with sweet seeds, and with a subtly vulvic vibe going on, the pomegranate is a symbol of fertility and lush, natural female beauty. The fruit reminds us of the stories of both Persephone (the High Priestess) & Demeter (the Empress) and the continuity of life each Spring; and the earth goddess Cybele, the Great Mother, whose lover’s blood formed the first pomegranate tree, and who acted as the mediator between the boundaries of the known and the unknown, the civilised and the wild, the worlds of the living and the dead.

The Hierophant card, with its traditional books and keys, plus a schoolyard blackboard in the background, does a really good job of conveying the idea of Hierophant-as-teacher. Khalil Gibran writes in ‘The Prophet‘, “the teacher who is indeed wise does not bid you to enter the house of his wisdom, but rather leads you to the threshold of your own mind”, and I think this card embodies this notion really neatly.

And then we have a gorgeous pair of Lovers, with their bodies made out of adjoining constellations of stars. Having been doing my deep-dive into the Lovers recently, I’ve just spent ages writing how the idea of this card as being about ‘star crossed’ Romeo & Juliet style romance is bit of a misconception, lol, but I think this card from the Craft Felt Tarot is not being as simplistic as that. The constellation shown isn’t a perfect match for Gemini, but it seems pretty close(?), and taken this way the card here doesn’t necessarily show two romantic lovers, but the twins, Castor & Pollux. When it appears in a reading this card can be about finding a person (or thing or life path) that speaks to us, that we ‘know’ and recognise as our ‘twin’, as a part of us, as something that makes us feel balanced or complete. And I think this card captures that really well.

The Wheel of Fortune as a gumball machine is just SO CUTE, I can’t! The guidebook tells us, “roll with what’s given / all colours have a sweetness / changing at each turn”.

I really like this stripped down version of Justice, with its core symbols of the sword and the scales, plus the addition of a mirror. The sword of Justice can be seen to represent rational insight, the analytical mind, and cognition. Bakara Wintner asks us “what does it look like when we can have faith in the efficacy of our minds and the soundness of our judgement?”, and answers, “we arrive at Justice”. Once we have done the hard work gaining the wisdom to be allowed to wield the sword, then it is ours to use as we shape and form our choices and our lives. Scales are about consequences; put a weight on one side and it will tip down. Hence Justice reminds us of the consequences of our actions: Maddy Elruna writes “wise people are aware of both scales, of how they affect others, and how others affect them”. Taken as a whole, then, Justice reminds us that life constantly asks us to make decisions, to weigh things up and make a choice. And once we’ve made that choice, our decisions become a part of us. That is the ‘justice’ of our lives – that we are what we’ve made ourselves. That’s why I really like the addition of the mirror here – it is Justice that allows us to hold up the mirror (the deep dark truthful mirror) to our lives and see what we’ve become.

Then the Hanged Man floating above the earth with his balloons is just lovely.

I love the lightning striking the Ace of Swords, like a sudden flash of insight.

The Five of Swords, showing the central figure literally walking on the heads of others to claim his victory, is brutal. It brings to mind the idiom ‘do not stoop to rise’, and reminds us that sometimes the cost of our success can be at the expense of others, urging us to consider whether that is a price too steep to pay.

A beautiful Queen of Cups with her teapot; her haiku reads ‘heart centred healer / holds tea of boundless love / serves where it’s needed‘. Gorgeous Queen of Cupsy words!

Some great modernisations of the Three of Wands, with its planes, trains, and automobiles theme, and the Six of Wands, with its gold medallist receiving the crowd’s adulation.

And the eight fast moving wands heading towards a bullseye is smart and looks awesome in felt!

I really like the fact that the Two of Pents here is not just juggling – trying to keep all his metaphorical plates spinning – but is also wearing multiple hats. This card can be about stretching ourselves too thin and trying to be all things to all people. A good worker, a good friend, a good partner or parent – all our different hats we have to wear – and sometimes that’s just not sustainable, even if we’re just about managing it.

I don’t think this photo does justice to how gorgeous the felt stained glass detailing is in the Five of Pents. It’s also interesting to me that I usually associate this card very strongly with a fairytale, The Little Match Girl. Yet here, with Lucci’s addition of a small black cat curled around the main figure’s shoulders, it reminds me of another tale, that of Dick Whittington. In the (much embellished!) folklore surrounding the (vaguely true-ish) story of Dick Whittington, he and his cat are running away from a life of poverty and misery in London. Exhausted, he stops to rest, lonely and despondent, only to hear the bells of Bow Church ringing out a tune which seems to be telling him, ‘Turn again Whittington, Lord Mayor of London’. He is persuaded by this to retrace his steps, and on his return to the city he experiences an abrupt change of fortune – ending up wealthy, happily married, and Mayor of London thrice over. Given the traditional versions of this card often show a broken figure stooped outside a church, I like this spin on the church bells urging us to reconsider our fortunes. As the haiku explains, “look up from your pain / help is waiting for you to / simply ask for it”.

Again, my photo of the card doesn’t do justice to quite how damn cute the Eight of Pents, with its beautifully iced little pastries, is 😍.

I appear to be on a bit of a Knights love-in at the moment – there’s been a tranche of decks come into my life with particularly strong Knights cards, and the Craft Felt Tarot is no exception. I love how much personality Lucci has managed to pack into these horses: the flame-maned mare of Wands, the prancey pony of Cups, the apocryphal and heroic white stallion of Swords, and the steady old workhorse of Pents.

The Craft Felt Tarot is a really fun, strikingly bright deck, that’s very easy to read with. It’s a bit more cutsey than the decks I usually buy, but it’s really smart and gorgeous, so it won me over and I’m glad it did! You can buy it here from the creator’s Etsy for £59.

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*yo, can we campaign for the Wiki entry to change to the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot instead of the Rider-Waite? I feel the community as a whole nearly always uses RWS as the preferred abbreviation instead of RW these days, and Colman Smith’s continued erasure from the deck *she bloody drew* is pretty old school sexism that is very much past its sell-by-date