How-to: House of Cards and Other 3D Structures Built with Upcycled Playing Cards

Of course, if you’re going to use hot glue, why stick to the conventional laws of gravity when building your house of cards? It’s no harder to glue your playing cards together in all kinds of improbable relationships than it is to stack them together properly.

In our homeschool, especially, I often give my girls a stack of old playing cards and the hot glue gun and assign them to create various geometrical forms, from simple shapes like squares and triangles to more complex ones like hexagons and interlinking figures.

The best creations, however, come when we set aside all the rules and simply use the playing cards as materials for 3D sculptures. And one day, if we ever have to choose between a sewing machine and a rowboat, or a new color TV, perhaps we’ll make a contest out of it, too.