Pinterest-Style Baseball Card Craft Projects

Since I took those 47 damaged Griffeys I used to decorate my 5,000 count Griffey Overflow Box out of genpop and permanently attached them to the box lid thereby rendering them untradeable, I just went ahead and subtracted them from the Griffey count.  Holy mackerel does that ever affect the duplicate ratio:

Before decorating the box: 7739/3146/2.460
After decorating the box: 7692/3146 (unchanged)/2.445

Since the number of unique cards did not change, the dupe ratio dropped a whopping 0.015.  I’m used to that number creeping up or down in very small fractions because the total count and unique count usually go up in concert.  With no change in the unique count this time and the total count dropping for the first time since its inception, this is a pretty radical change.  Is it cheating?  Totally.  Do I feel ashamed?  Psh.

So, with the success of this change, I’m looking for creative ways to shed duplicate Griffey weight that will add to rather than detract from the greatness of the collection.  I don’t want to just unload a few hundred on eBay – that may be considered cheating - I want something constructive.  Here are a few brainstorms:

Bicycle spoke wall art.  I may see if I can find an old bicycle wheel and affix Griffeys to the spokes (a dozen or so) like kids used to do but in such a way that still shows off the card.  Then mount the wheel to the wall as an objet d’art.  Creative, nostalgic – this could be fun.  I’m just not sure I have the wall space.

Cover all my high capacity card boxes in them.  As mentioned above I’ve already done this with the most substantial box I have, but I wouldn’t use Griffeys on non-Griffey boxes.  This is a better idea for non-Griffey cards.

Paper a wall with Griffeys.  I’ve wanted to do this one for a long time.  It wouldn’t be a big wall – maybe a small accent wall.  I could attach the cards to a piece of foam core and mount that so as not to damage the sheetrock with glue.  I may start looking around the house for a good place to do this – it would have to be somewhere my wife doesn’t see often.

Make a framed card collage.  This would be cheap and fun.  I’d probably get one of those large 27x40 poster frames and just slap cards on a piece of foam core with craft glue then trim and stick it in the frame.  I can fit a lot more cards this way as opposed to those card display frames that let you slide top leaders into them, and I can place the cards flush against each other with no space in-between.  I’ve also considered doing patterns and angles.  The possibilities are endless, and the whole project could be done for around $25.

Imbed them into furniture.  We have a big garage with a pool table and bar and such.  The seating is two 8’ church pews I got on Craigslist.  The seats of the pews are padded, but I could attach cards to the wood backrests and put some kind of protective coating.  The problem here is that the current back is a nice wood grain.  Not sure I’d feel right about covering that up.

Is it obvious yet that I don’t have kids?

Cutout collage.  This could go a few ways.  The obvious is a big cluster of action cutouts.  The one I'm more excited about would be a mass of nameplate cutouts all arranged together with no negative space.  Just a big mess of multicolored "Ken Griffey, Jr." nameplates all over.  Some will have just his last name all big, some will have his full name on brightly-colored bars, some would have foil, some would have holofoil.  It would be an amazing mix of colors, textures, and paper types all densely packed together in one space.  This would probably be smaller, say 8x10, but it would have a lot of bang.  It could be awesome, too, if lots of different players you like are used.

Share your ideas here!  Let's get creative.

(Quick note: I did a quick search on Pinterest to see if anyone had a good idea for old baseball cards.  I only saw a couple, and they're nothing spesh.  We can come up with better ones.)