disastrously botched trimmings

Ok, I´ll admit it. I´ve made a pig´s ear of trimming a deck, and I´m not ashamed to come clean. I don´t feel too bad about it because it´s a Scarabeo deck (the Visconti Sforza, hardly rare) and I only paid 5 euros for it. The nightmarish thing about it is that I didn´t need to trim it at all. As soon as Id bought it, I saw that the top three cards were faulty and so set to work and then found those self-same cards in the middle of the deck. The faulty cards were in fact duplicates. Odd I know, but...

Anyway, Id started so I had to finish, and you know how it is, there you are, snipping merrily and thinking to yourself "yes, it looks better" and deep down you know, you just KNOW it doesn´t look very good. But you think, "when it´s finished, it´ll look better: you only see the full effect at the end"...

Anyway, so I got to the end of the deck, rounded all the corners with my natty corner rounder, laid it out on the table and I just knew I´d never read with it. It just looked completely wrong. Never again shall I wish that cards came without borders. I´m now of the camp that says "a thin border is best", or "most images look better with a small border".

And I knew that my trimmed Visconti Sforza would just sit on the shelf looking at me accusingly, so I threw it away. Feel much better about it now. And anyway, the shop where I found it has a still-sealed 1980s U.S Games edition for 10 euros. This whole experience shall soon be wiped from my memory.

Any other botched trimming jobs to share? Those decks you tried to convince yourself "it doesn´t look THAT bad".. and then shoved it to the back of the drawer never to lay eyes on it again. ..

Come on, be honest...

I've yet to trim any decks myself, but still manage to have 3 of them in my collection:
- a Mythic that I was told had not the best trimming job done on it only to find that as far as I'm concerned it's perfect!
- a Druidcraft that was trimmed to the stone borders
- an unevenly trimmed Tavaglione that my partner was given. One day I may try to even out the trim job and round the corners.

I have a New Star Tarot that's screaming for a trim job and rounded corners, so that'll prob be my first trim job, but not this year....

Rodney

I'm too afraid to trim! But I do have everything I will need to do it.

I'm awaiting the Druidcraft so I may do that one. And when I reacquire the large Thoth I plan to do that one as well.

Through several different people, I ended up with someone's "botched" World Spirit in a trade.
I absolutely adore it. I don't care that the back designs are sort of cut off, or that they look a little weird...

they are smaller, and they handle like a dream!

I've never trimmed a deck. I'm still dithering on trimming the large Thoth I bought solely for that purpose. I know that if I botch any of the cards it will just irk me constantly.

I don't know if you'd call it a botched job, exactly, but it didn't turn out very well. I had an Archeon I knew I wouldn't read with as a tarot, so I decided to trim the borders off and make it a sort of intuitive oracle.

Snipped all the borders off, still with the square corners. Go at them with the corner rounder...halfway through the process, it snaps clean in half. Talk about cheap products. I'm not sure if I want to buy another corner rounder (it was a little pricey!) and hope it was a manufacturing flaw, or just chuck out the deck. I doubt I'll ever read with it as an oracle, either.

The only other two decks I trimmed, a large Thoth and the Tarot of Eden, turned out spectacularly well.

catbaloo said:

I know that if I botch any of the cards it will just irk me constantly.

Click to expand...

Believe me, it will. I wanted to start this thread as the other side of the trimming frenzy. There must be more disasters out there.

Beware all ye who think you´re going to improve your deck. It may not look quite as nice as you think.

To be honest, I think I´ve learnt my lesson. I don´t think I´m going to trim again. No border´s ever THAT bad.

In the spirit of keeping trimming disasters to a minimum:

Here's a suggestion for the people who aren't sure if their deck will look better trimmed or untrimmed.

Before I took the scissors to my World Spirit, I experimented with digital images of the deck. How does it look like if I just trim off the titles? The complete black border? The colored border, too? I digitally trimmed a few cards to represent a selection of images (lightness/darkness, colors, etc.). In the end, I went for trimming away the complete black border but leaving the colored one. No regrets so far!
I guess you could do the same with digitally rounding corners, although that might require some more skills in Photoshop or a similar program. I haven't tried it yet.

For the ones who are afraid that they'll not cut evenly enough, someone suggested in another thread having a printer's do it. Not a regular copy shop, if I might add, because some of them seem to have problems cutting flyers accurately around here... I would never trust any of them with a tarot deck. Printers, however, I'd expect to have some correctly working equipment - and employees...

I guess trimming is a lot like getting an entirely new haircut - you never know if you'll regret it or love it until you've actually done it...

Le Fanu said:

And I knew that my trimmed Visconti Sforza would just sit on the shelf looking at me accusingly, so I threw it away. Feel much better about it now. And anyway, the shop where I found it has a still-sealed 1980s U.S Games edition for 10 euros. This whole experience shall soon be wiped from my memory.

Click to expand...

Ya know, Fanu - if you hadn't thrown it away, and you didn't live in Lisbon, I'd say toss it in the mail to me! You never know what kind of interesting deck could be made of the cards - perhaps a face-only version of trumps and courts a la Touchstone Tarot.

Ya wanna fish it out for me??

My first trimming foray was the Rohrig.

OOP.

Indestructible cardstock.

Huge cards . . . hard to keep a straight line.

Yep.

It's ruined.

\m/ Kat