Celery Stick, Taxicab, and Viking Ship

November 20, 2006 1:40 PM

What's something fun and creative I can do with paint chips?

They are too short to make a
paint chip wallet
and not wide enough to make a
paint chip card holder.
They're your standard 2"x6" strips.

One idea was to take my favorites and somehow attach them to my moleskine planner, but I'm not getting a new one until Christmas and am dying to do something cool now!

posted by kidsleepy to Media & Arts (9 answers total)

Maybe somebody else can help me remember where I saw this, but a magazine once had an article about putting paint chips under the glass of a glass-topped coffee table. It was like a simple mosaic design, with kind of a graduated color pattern. I've also seen simple framed mosiac patterns to hang on your wall.

Another online search suggested place cards. I have a bunch and sometimes use them for background colors when making greeting cards. You can get a paper punch (the larger ones sold in craft stores) and use those--put adhesive on the back of them and use them to put polka-dots on a package or something.

Cut them and use them for labels for boxes? Punch a hole in the end of them and string a piece of ribbon through them for gift tags?
posted by printchick at 1:47 PM on November 20, 2006

Punch them out with a hole puncher and make some kind of mosaic out of them.
posted by Doohickie at 1:47 PM on November 20, 2006

Response by poster: on a side note, why did my links come out all wonky?
posted by kidsleepy at 1:47 PM on November 20, 2006

How many do you have? I made a giant abstract mosiac on my wall with the ones I acquired from Home Depot. Took forever though.
posted by wildgarlic at 2:06 PM on November 20, 2006

Make matchboxes? bookmarks? bookplates?

Use two to make the cover for a home-bound miniature moleskin, or a tiny book of printed hipsterPDA cards?
posted by -harlequin- at 2:08 PM on November 20, 2006

A game we've played at nature/science camps is to give each child a paint chip and task them with finding something in the woods to match their color during their time at camp. Some people took this further to write a story about the found object using the paint name (they are always so "romantic" like twilight chimes and so on).

Starting from that idea, maybe you could use the chips to inspire a photography project/scavenger hunt by handing them out to your friends with the same "find this color!" task (in the woods, suburbia, where ever) and then collecting all the pictures together and mounting them with the original chips.

Could be fun!
posted by nelleish at 4:43 PM on November 20, 2006

You can buy a hole-punch dealie at office supply stores that cuts twin holes in a business card to fit it into a standard Rolodex. I've used it on paint chips to repurpose them as prettypretty address/phone cards. As long as the paint chips are wide enough to be punched but not wider than the spinny wheels on your Rolodex, it'll work.
posted by ersatzkat at 5:41 PM on November 20, 2006

i made a paint chip door curtain/hanging. i cut all the white out of each one, poked a small hole on the top and bottom of each square, and then linked them all together with paper clips.
posted by kerning at 6:38 PM on November 20, 2006

This year's Smallest Coolest Apartment contest from Apartment Therapy featured a place where the frugal renter framed paint chips and hung them on the wall. The result was simple, clever, and beautiful.
posted by melissa may at 2:11 AM on November 21, 2006