adventures in card engineering
I just spent two and a half hours making my niece a simple pop-up birthday card. I do these things for myself, really, because I'm pretty sure that my niece is not the sort of child who treasures things and takes special care of them, which means that she will open the thing and, if she takes note of it at all, will think the bunnies are cute and
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(1) Come up with a design easily cut with an X-Acto knife. You should have a lot of negative space on either side of the design, and in between objects as well. (I made the mistake, in this one, of leaving too little white space between the bunnies, which makes the paper isthmus very hard to glue down straight onto the backing.)
(2) bisect the cardstock you'll be cutting lightly with a pencilled line. You'll fold along that line, but don't fold just yet! And then pencil in another line about half an inch below it.
(3) transfer your design to the cardstock, letting the bottom rest on the lowest line. Decorate at will!
(4) draw two reasonably sturdy vertical tabs at the top, about half an inch high. (They'll look something like paper-doll-clothing foldover tabs.)
(5) Cut the design out carefully with an X-Acto knife. Cut everything except the tops of the paper-doll-type tabs and the places where the bottom of the design touches the baseline.
(6) press out the design, and then fold the card in half while leaving the design un-folded. As the card folds, pull the design outward slightly, so that the base and top-tabs both fold.
(7) Erase all leftover pencil marks. (This is another reason to have both a solid, un-delicate design and solid white space -- erasing can do a lot of damage to a finely-cut paper.)
(8) glue the backing to a sheet of contrasting cardstock.
(9) Write your message, if indeed there is one, below the bottom of the popup part.
Et voila! Does that make sense? :D
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