Travel Card Box

Posted in Projects on July 27th, 2014 by The Cyberwolfe

Completed Box

We play a lot of Quiddler in this house, so naturally we like to take one with us when we travel. The box it normally comes in is fine, but we’ve been in a couple spots where it would be nice to have something to corral all of the cards during the game so that they don’t slide all over the place – the deck is over 100 cards, so it can get pretty messy if your only horizontal surface isn’t exactly firm or level…

In any case, I thought it would be nice to have a custom case for our most-played game. You could use this same idea for any number of large-deck card games.

Rough Protoype

The original design idea seen here was pieced-together and box-stitched, and I think it would still be a nice way to do it – but I didn’t get my seam allowances correct in this prototype, and the thing ended up being too small (by like an effing millimeter…) so I had to rebuild from scratch. And while the box stitch always looks good, it’s a pain in the ass so I went with the frame-and-cap design I  used originally on the card divider way back when.

Loaded for Game

As you can see on the final piece, by the time I was ready to do the top, I was completely sick of sewing and came up with a folded & riveted design instead. It came out just the slightest bit… off… somehow, and the corners aren’t all exact, but it was good enough to keep so I left it alone.

Speaking of “off”, if you look at the top in that first picture, you may notice that my geometric stamp pattern isn’t quite straight as well. Turns out, doing this sort of pattern stamping is a bit of a beast, and you really need a guide framework to get it perfect. Luckily, there’s a Craftaid for that, and it’s on my shopping list. Highly recommended if you plan on doing this sort of thing.