December 2021 Pop-Up

Spam, spam, spam, and spam!

Idea

This comes from a bit of family history.

One Christmas visit to a far away town, a certain family member (who shall remain nameless) and his spouse, decided to return to the family estate on none other than Christmas day. (Probably to avoid traffic, or some such excuse.) When he stopped for a nightly respite there was no room at the inn was not one tavern, pub, nor restaurant open. Being the good provider for his bride, he decided to forage local establishments for a hearty meal. “Lo! What is this?” he cried. “Are the purveyors of fruits, vegetables, and meat not selling their wares this Christmas day?” Looking far and wide, the only thing he could find was a lonely tin of Spam at an automobile service station.

I decided to have a tin of Spam as the centerpiece on a nice Spode platter, arrayed with an elegant Christmas garnish.

Design

The box is variation of BT9 (45° folds) that I found in a children’s book some years back. Unfortunately, I neglected to make note of the name of that book, or the paper engineer. It’s built on a V fold that tips back as the card is opened. Since it’s a box, you want it to stand up 90° with the base, but since it folds upwards such mechanisms tend to appear to lean forward when opened. For such cases, I usually make the base 85° to have it tip slightly backwards. With the garnish, you can’t really see it, but the bottom of the tin tapers a bit.

Here is the diagram for the box, with one error. The solid lines are cut, and dashed are mountain folds. There are a couple valley folds not show on each end of the top. The mistake is that the length of the piece jutting upwards (the center support), is too short. I designed the box in the Silhouette Cameo’s software, but since it was all straight lines and I needed it to line up 100% accurately with the printed photo, I cut it by hand.¹

The tops of boxes are usually the tricky part. There’s a support in the center that pushes it up to make it fit together nicely as it fully opens. Unlike other box mechanisms, this uses 45° cuts on the ends which I think fit better than ones that use 90° since there are folds on all four sides of the top.

To dress it up a bit, the garnish surrounds the front of the tin, and is a simple V fold, again at 85°

Cover

The background is decorative paper, and the drawing is in colored pencils. The text is a nod to Cratchit’s dinner conversation during the visit from the Ghost of Christmas Present. The back has a small drawing of a Tiny Tim mouse saying – you guessed it – “God bless us, everyone!”

And, yes, this is a one-armed mouse.

Build

• 9” x 6”
• The speech balloon on the cover was cut by the Silhouette Cameo.
• The box, cover mouse, and garnish were cut by hand.
• The base is Strathmore 300 Bristol 100lb, with printed backgrounds inside. The mouse on the cover is done with PrismaColor colored pencils.
• The Spam tin was printed on glossy photo paper.