This version of my Fiery Wands Tarot deck is hand-made by me, Sushila Burgess, from prints of my own original artwork. The cards are the classic Tarot size: approx. 4.85x2.85 inches (12.3x7.2cm). These are light-weight but strong cards made from sketch paper coated in laminating plastic. IN STOCK, ships in 1-3 business days.

The deck consists of 79 cards: the usual 78, most of them loosely based on the images of the Rider-Waite deck, plus one bonus one. When I was first starting on my Tarot project, I was inspired by the old medieval deck, the Tarot of Besançon, which has "The Juggler", "Juno" and "Jupiter" as the first, second and fifth cards. I chose that deck as a model because Besançon is a special place for me - it was the destination of my very first ever journey to a foreign country at the age of 17 - and it seemed as if it was meant to be. So I started my deck with a picture of a showman, dressed as a harlequin, juggling with fiery clubs or wands. But then I decided to paint a Magician after all: he floats like a translucent phantom above the blue mountain tops, his magical symbols hovering around him. The Magician is now the first card of the deck, but I am also including the Juggler as a bonus, so that people can choose for themselves which one they would like to use.

This version of the deck marks a return to making my items completely by hand, at least sometimes. I have been through a phase of having cards professionally printed rather than making them up myself. I felt they still qualified as hand-made, as every detail of every image came straight from my own hand-painted artwork - four years of painting, in fact - evening after evening, weekend after weekend, with a paintbrush in my hand! But as regards assembling the cards, I had got absolutely sick of the fiddliness of trying to print the backs of the cards so that they lined up correctly with the front. It was a nightmare.

However, at last I finally came up with a solution that allowed me to hand-make my cards again. Instead of trying to print the design onto the back of the cards using a printer, I managed to get a retro manual stamp, just like the sort of things that librarians used in the olden days: ker-chunk would go the stamp, and there was the date you had to return your book. However, I've been able to get hold of a customised stamp, and so instead of a date, I can stamp the backs with my own leaf design.

In this particular deck, I then coloured in the backs with water-colours, in delicate shades of green, blue and yellow, before laminating. This means that there is quite a lot of variation in the backs of the cards. Most of them have come out as a very pale green, but some of them are more of a yellow-green and some have crossed the green-blue borderline and are actually blue. Some have a yellow border, but others had their yellow border trimmed off while I was cutting them to size. The photos of the deck show the full range of colours, so that you can decide whether they are similar enough to suit you.

The cards are presented with a front and back cover sheet, in a colourful recycled box decorated with stickers of suns and moons.