The Victorian Flower Oracle, with Companion Book by AT-er!

Queen of Pentacle said:

I ever you want a pattern for your boxes, you may go to this site, give mesurement and a lovely adapted boxe pattern will appear. Excellent as you may chose size, are magic realist press are a little larger than the standard. Not magic, but close to it.

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Yes thanks, I've been using his patterns for several years for boxes I paint and collage myself, including computer scans of relevant images. I prefer to tweak his patterns to get rid of the writing and shading and adjust the flap sizes.

I have discovered after printing my templates for this, that when they lay out on the Magic Realist box--some of the folds will then hit the folds on the original box, which really is magic.

They look pretty nice though, I will post scans when I'm done.

Queen of Pentacle said:

But i'd really prefer that the standard box should be include in the kit.

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I had better explain why we don't do this. We'd love to, but unfortunately the whole distribution thing means that the cost price of producing a deck gets multiplied many times over by the time it gets to the retailer. If we added a deck box inside the kit it means (with our small not-made-in-China print runs) that the final kit would come out at anything between $8 and $10 more - OUCH! There is nothing we can do about this - we can't say to the distributors, please only add the actual cost of the box, as they work strictly on percentages. For our own limited editions we merrily add internal boxes as we don't have to multiply the cost so it doesn't shoot it up to something absurd.

One day if we make things very, very cheaply in the Far East (in the tens of thousands) then the economics might change - but that's a long way off and who knows if we will ever go there.

Meantime we are talking about the feasibility of selling some spare deck boxes on our own shop. And of course we do make beautiful tarot bags which we can keep very low cost for the quality as we sell them direct.

I'm really sorry. If we could do more we would.

baba-prague said:

If we added a deck box inside the kit it means (with our small not-made-in-China print runs) that the final kit would come out at anything between $8 and $10 more - OUCH!

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No kidding? Isn't that weird. I know another deck author/artist who was eventually forced to go to China for printing.

Well, I just happily cut out my boxes. I had one seam down the front (which I will be using as the back), so in order to reinforce that, I collaged two small cards from the back of the original box over the seam--a good way of not wasting terrific pictures.

I have to wait for the collage to dry completely and then I'll glue the boxes together for show and tell. There's always a solution to these things. I'm sorry Jackdaw discarded her box covers, it works very well.

baba-prague said:

I'm really sorry. If we could do more we would.

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You do so much already! I think it's a small price to pay for the quality - have you seen the thread on our favourite publishers??

And room, I'm still waiting on my kit for this deck, so I will try it out

Okay, here's my Flower Oracle box.

The back is not quite as good as the front because of the seam and gluing the flaps, BUT I did manage through no design of my own <g> to get the words "Victorian Flower" down the side.

I don't achieve perfection but I have a suitable box!

And the Fantastic Menagerie Box.

Okay, I'll quit blathering about this. I had a real bee in my bonnet just to satisfy my own curiosity.

I'm very happy I made the effort. I often put cards in bags too, but I find the cards tend to bow without a box as well.

Room, those are brilliant! It's so nice to see the large boxes being used. In fact the card is the same as the card we use for the small boxes so this ought to work.

As for printing in China. Well, I have nothing against it in theory but we are a long way off that - and as Alex insists on being with the printers when they print (wisely) it could cause some logistical problems!

I think we may put some spare boxes on to the shop, though some people will think this is madness. I think in future we'll try to do some "deals" on the bags too - so that pre-orders on decks get some discount on a bag. Or we could throw in a box. It's not that the boxes are so expensive to produce, just that it adds up scarily once it goes through distribution. But direct, we could do it I think.

They do look great, room! Will definitely have to try that with my Victorian Flower Oracle ...

Those look amazing! I'm deffinately going to try that with my Victorian Flower Oracle's box as well.

I've been using this deck pretty consistantly since I received it as a gift from Baroli52 (thanks Baroli!). I've pulled a daily card each morning. The deck really is far deeper than it looks on first glance. Deffinately my favorite oracle, and the only one I've used this consistantly.

I wasn't interested in the Fantastic Menagerie (animals aren't quite my thing), but after working with this deck I'm reconsidering.

baba-prague said:

It's so nice to see the large boxes being used. In fact the card is the same as the card we use for the small boxes so this ought to work.

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Well, the big boxes are so beautiful in graphics and layout, that I couldn't bear to throw them out. Because the Magic Realist covers are like a slipcase they work very well for this. When you cut them open you get a front and back unimpeded by rigid flaps and glue.

I was checking some of my Llewellyn boxes but they have heavy tabs and gluing and don't look like they'd fold down as well.

I think maybe one day I'll do it for the Fairytale as well.