I’m finally almost out of business cards YAY!! This means I can finally print the new design with my new contact details and correct hair colour 😀 😀 😀 That’s right, I’ve had these since I had a blogspot address -_-‘
Anyway back on topic I was making up the last of the cards on Monday and decided to make up a new business card holder for my bag.
My cards are an annoying size, I love the bows but it makes them so hard to keep in a wallet or purse. I’ve had a couple of business card holder over the years but considering their size I can only ever keep a couple in there at a time… completely useless.
A few months ago I was at the Forever New store at DFO and they had a rack of broken things for $2, I picked up this broken manicure kit. It’s the perfect size for business cards because it has space for the tools inside!
So I turned it from this:
To this:
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What you need:
or
Plus:
Now the original one of these was glued together so I decided to hot glue mine. It probably would hold better if I was to have used epoxy on the metal parts but it’s held up in my handbag well so far so I probably won’t redo it. First thing I did was to take the whole thing apart.
I had to unpick the inside stitching but it all came apart fairly easily.
From this point on we’ll assume I’m doing this from materials from scratch. Cut out cardboard and foam in the same shape and size as each side of the butterfly hinge.
Now cut out rectangles which are big enough to cover the  cardboard pieces with a few cm of overhang each side.
So that’s all of the pieces ready to go, let’s assemble it all! Start with the cardboard.
Glue a layer of felt to it and trim the edges:
Next add a rectangle of the inside fabric on top of the felt. Hold it in place by gluing a thin line around the edge. My metal piece was around 4mm wide so I had heaps of room to hide the glue.
Now time to make a pocket! Take a second rectangle of inside fabric and fold it in half. Place the folded piece half way up and glue around the edges to hold in place. Don’t glue where the fold is otherwise you will be gluing your pocket shut XD
Trim all of the extra fabric off.
Repeat for the other side!
Now flip the cardboard over and glue the foam to the other side.
Next you need to glue both cardboard pieces to the metal butterfly. They should just sit on the outside like this:
Closed it looks like this:
Inside is done now we just need to make the outside look pretty. Grab the first rectangle of the outside fabric and glue it in place on the hinge edge.
Pull tight and glue on the other edge near the clip. Hinge on the right and clip on the left below:
My butterfly clip had a big groove around the edge where the fabric was previously held in by plastic tubing. I didn’t have any plastic tubing so instead I put a line of glue in then pressed the fabric into it using the nail file that came with the kit XD That way I could make sure it was all nice and tight.
I then trimmed the extra off with the nail scissors that also came with it… useful kit! Repeat the whole process on the other side and it’s almost finished.
Taadaa…
But you can still see the edges of everything in the groove so the easiest way to fix that is to cover it with ribbon!
I used 5mm ribbon which was wide enough to cover the gap and still have a little on either side.
Start at the back near the hinge and slowly glue ribbon over the gap. Make sure not to get glue on the hinge or you won’t be able to open it!
Repeat on the other side too. Make sure you’re really careful with the glue here because if you get it out of place you might have to remove the whole thing and start from scratch.
Where the ribbon meets I folded the edges before gluing.
Done!
Nice pretty inside with pockets to hold lots of business cards 😀
Still small enough not to be annoying in the handbag and much more stylish than just throwing them in there ^_^ What do you guys think? |
