Read command line arguments from a file

Directory structure:

/home
---ubuntu
------projects
---------project1
---------project2
---------project3
------.ignore

.ignore:

*project1* *project2*

If I run:

zip -r zipush.zip projects -x "$(< .ignore)"

Then it creates a zip containting all three projects - which is a wrong result. I want it to ignore project1 and project2.

However, it does work well when I write the arguments explicitly:

zip -r zipush.zip projects -x *project1* *project2*

But I don't understand why, because "$(< .ignore)" seems to work well when I type for example:

echo "$(< .ignore)"

Output:

 *project1* *project2*