Homemade.

       As I have mentioned before, I have a deep adoration for oddball cards and food issues.  It would seem that a very specific aspect of that particular kind of card has been fodder for some recent debate.  I'd be lying if I didn't often look at other posts and say "me too!" and I am going to do that here, but add a twist at the end.

Here is a page of random unsorted retired players that I have in a binder but have not fully organized nor integrated into the rest of my collection:

I am going to do something that haven't done on this blog (I don't think) and just focus in on three of the cards on that page:

What you see are three old school food issues cut off the sides and/or backs of boxes, all to varying success.  I am pretty sure whoever snipped off that 1976 Hostess Bake McBride sneezed somewhere near the bottom.  How else do you explain the sudden and inexplicable chunk taken out of the lower right corner?  That 1962 Post Felipe Alou has been well loved all around.  It was cut with B+ precision, but then obviously put into the kids' back pocket.  Those are some impressive creases, even by my low standards.  That 1961 Jim Coates is cut rather well, but it is the back thatI find much more interesting...

...I believe that is a baseball rubdown from one of the 1960's oddball sets floating around (someone with a better knowledge of the 60's could help me out on that one), a rather ingenious use of them, by the way, to fill in the empty brown cardboard void.  That is why that random Yankees common has remained in my collection all these years.

But those three cards are before my time.  How did I do as a kid when the scissors were allowed out of the drawer (there was a nasty incident in my extreme youth where I played "haircut" with my little sister, thus eternally banning me from using scissors without permission.  Even as an adult I find myself asking permission to use the scissors, rather than asking where they are.  But I digress...)  The following cards have been in my collection for decades and each and every one of them were cut off of their cardboard panels by yours truly:

Not too bad, if I do say so myself.  The top two 1987 Fleer cards are box bottom cards.  The Grote is a 1976 Hostess card that I cut off of a panel I bought at a show in the late 80's.  That one is the only one with some suspect trimming.  It would seem that I had the same issue with a lower corner as the aforementioned Bake McBride card, though quite not to the same extreme.  Perhaps there is something about those cards that just begs for poor trimming.  The 1986 Topps Gooden is also a box bottom card - very sharp.  The other four drakes cards are slightly smaller by nature, not by butcher.  I included that Gooden Glossy All Star card as a visual guide of a standard issue size card (I am also amused that the two pictures on the 1986 Drakes and that card are practically identical).  So, perhaps it is cheap 1970's cardboard that makes for bad card cutting, not over-caffeinated or under-intelligent children.  Oh, and it seems I have doubles of that 1986 Drakes Gooden in the middle, so if you want/need/desire that card, drop me an email. 

So where was this twist I promised?  Well, I have done other things with scissors and baseball cards and  boxes.  First, I like to make binder labels out of them...

I have about a million of those "Topps of the Class" cards laying around, so it made sense to tag my Topps binders with them. Here I do the same thing for a football binder...

I also noticed that the graphics on the boxes were kinda neat, so maybe I could make labels out of them:

I am pretty sure that football label is the first one I consciously made to be a label for my binders.  I also noticed that recent modern binders use a label that is the standard size of a baseball card.  So making binder labels out of card boxes then grew into me finding the best 2 1/2 x 3 1/2 bits on a box and making my own unique cards out of them:

One of the obvious drawbacks of this little art project is they use a lot of Yankees on baseball card boxes.  Luckily, I have Big Papi and Bruce Lee to balance out all that Jeter and A-Rod nastiness.

That middle card there is from a blaster of 2009 OPC, I believe, and it makes for a better ad than any of the advertisement cards Upper Deck put in their packs the last few years.  These cards are also the only time I ever put cards in back-to-back, since the opposite side is either blank cardboard or very abstract bits of the reverse of the box. So what you are seeing here is only two pages:

That middle card is the closest I will ever get to having the Abraham Lincoln DNA card in my collection, but that is certainly good enough for me.  I even got some of the A&G box seal onto that one.  I like to see if I can get odd little bits into the card like that...like the hologram on the Drew Brees card, or the kung-fu dude flying out behind the Ken Griffey card.  The bottom right card is not from a baseball card box, it is actually from a Whiffle Ball display.

Since I so rarely buy any new product, much less entire boxes of new product, I am afraid those last four or five spaces might never get filled in.  I have a bunch of other homemade box cards scattered in my collection, so perhaps I will bring them all together just to have the pages complete.  I thought with all this talk of cutting out cards off of boxes, I would go a little outside the lines and show you what someone with a pair of scissors and a lot of time (and boxes) on his hands could do.