Are my spells working as they should be

The cards don't tell you whether magic is happening — they tell you what kind of work your practice currently is, and on this draw it's more thinking-and-declaring than checking.

Past — Knight of Swords, upright. This is how the work started: mind first, said out loud, fast, declared. Every working begins with a clear concept and a sharpened intention. That's a real strength, and it's also the machine that produces the feeling of "I did it properly."

Present — Five of Pentacles, reversed. The present is material, not spiritual — money, body, daily conditions, the plain side of life. Reversed here, the shortage energy is turned inward rather than lifted: you're standing outside the window rather than at the door, reading the conditions as withholding. Whatever the working is aimed at, this is where it lands — in ordinary conditions, not in a dramatic change.

Future — Three of Pentacles, reversed. If this continues, the craft part drops out. Reversed Three of Pentacles is work done without anyone checking the work: doing it alone, improvising the method each time, or skipping the step where an experienced person looks at what you built.

Relations: all three cards are Minor, so this sits in the practical, fixable layer, not fate. Two of the three are Pentacles — resources, time, money, body — which is why the present seat lands where it does. One court card among two event cards: the Knight is your posture, not a person. The suit spread is Air against Earth, plan meeting material reality, and it's the friction between those two that the reading is about.

The conditional: open your own record of the last few workings — dates, exact wording, the materials, what happened in the following days. If the entries line up and you can see the effect following the act, then what's holding this back is the Three of Pentacles reversal: the work is going unchecked, and one other practitioner reviewing a single written working would change more than another round of self-reflection. If the record is thin, or the results don't follow the acts, then the Knight of Swords is the culprit — the framing and the declaration are doing more work than the actual procedure, and the method needs narrowing to one fixed, repeatable form before it's worth judging.

Your one step, within 48 hours: write out the last three workings on paper — date, exact words used, materials, and what you observed afterwards — and put them side by side so you can see the pattern rather than the intention. That record is the only thing in this that the cards cannot supply for you.