Stinkerpants

Moo Card Photo Collage, a la Stinkerpants

May 14, 2009 in Personal Projects • Displaying Memories

{ photo credit }

Last night my friend Lisa introduced me to Sabine Scherer (a great photographer) and Stacy McCainLisa’s business cards.  If you’re still with me after all that, I’ll get to my point:  Lisa (the second one, haha) uses Moo Cards for business cards.  These are fantastic little cards, especially if you’re an artist or a photographer.  They’re an odd size–about half the size of a regular business card–and the colors are really bright and high quality.  They’re fun to use as business cards because people always comment on the odd size. (check out her event planning website! I love the circus logo!), and we got talking about our other friend

I have some moo cards, but I don’t use them as business cards (I’m more of a “let’s get 1000 business cards for $50″ kind of girl).  While we were talking, I told these lovely ladies that I’d share the project I did with Moo cards–so here it is!  :)

I first heard about Moo cards a couple of years ago through Flickr.  They were doing a giveaway because they’d just launched.  When I got my trial pack I totally wanted more; something about their size made me want to collect them (and people totally do!).

What to do with them, though?   I decided to create a piece of artwork for our living room, which showcased the 18-day cross-country roadtrip that Y and I took in 2006 (Ohio to Maine to San Francisco).

This piece of artwork took a bit of planning and was kind of a headache, but I think it turned out really well–definitely worth the effort.  It’s a conversation piece, too, which is always fun:

This big collage is made up of 100 little Moo Cards–some are horizontal and some are vertical.

Even closer up:

As you can imagine, figuring out how to arrange 100 cards so they end up forming a perfect rectangle is kind of frustrating.  It’s like a puzzle.

But I already did all the work, so I thought I’d make a chart for you guys, just in case you want to do this yourself:

The collage uses 100 moo cards (make sure you order the mini cards).  When picking your photos, make sure to orient 60 of them horizontally and 40 of them vertically.  I haven’t ordered from them in years, but I recall that it was very easy, because we already had our photos on Flickr.

I (obviously) made a giant collage (finished size was 27″ wide by 11″ high), but if you wanted to, you could split this in half to make two, or in thirds to make three separate pieces.

Framing tip:

The most frustrating part of this project wasn’t actually the arranging of the cards: it was getting a mat cut for the frame.  I went to Aaron Brothers and asked for a mat, which they had to cut five times.  Apparently, mats are usually made so they cut off 1/4″ of the artwork all the way around.  Doing that for this project, though, looks really bad–you miss half of a moo card if you take away 1/4″ inch of it.   Make sure to specify that the measurements you provide (27″ x 11″) are the exact measurements of the part you want cut out.

I’m not sure what any of you will do with this, but maybe it’ll inspire you to make a piece of art out of your wedding photos!

(And to Sabine and Stacy–it was great to meet you last night!)