I got business cards for my website! Yeah, woohoo, hooray – hold on! Record scratch! Where am I going to put them? I didn’t think to order a business card holder when I ordered the business cards. I thought, “I’m crafty…I’ll just make a business card holder.”

You see, I had pinned this tutorial for making a paint chip business card holder a while back. The guy who created the tutorial did an awesome job of explaining how he made the paint chip card holder and he even included two different templates that you could print out to fit different sizes of business cards.

The guy at DesignVerb! (I think Aaron is his name) mentioned that he used Behr paint chips from The Home Depot. Perfect! I go to The Home Depot all the time to get spray paint and other heavy-duty craft supplies. So I went along my merry way and picked up some purple (of course) Behr paint chips from Home Depot. I then printed out the template and started trying to figure things out. That’s when I ran into my problem.

The DesignVerb tutorial was posted back in 2006, and since then, Behr paint chips have apparently gotten smaller. There was no way I was going to be able to make a proper business card holder using that template with my paint chips. So I put my crafty brain to work and figured out how to make it using two of the paint chips.

First, I glued together two of the paint chips. I tried to line up the chips and glue them together so it looked like just one long paint chip.

Next I got a gift card holder from the dollar store. The box was the perfect size to be a business card holder, and while I could have just covered the box with the paint chips, I wanted to actually make the box out of the paint chips. These were 2 for $1, so I didn’t feel bad dissembling one of them for my project.

I planned to use the disassembled gift card box as a template, but the glued-together paint chips weren’t big enough to fit the whole thing in one piece. I cut the box in two pieces along the bottom seam and then traced the box onto the paint chip. Where it’s a dashed line it means to fold it (not cut it).

I cut out the template, folded along the dotted lines, and taped the pieces together. Last but not least, I sewed on a button to hold the top in place. As far as the last step, you could probably glue on some velcro or glue two buttons on with a rubber band to hold the two together. It’s a pretty versatile craft. The completed business card holder comfortably holds about 25 business cards.

If anybody wants the template to make the business card holder from paint chips let me know! If enough people request it I’ll put up a template on Google docs.