What to do with leftover graduation announcements
Idea
I saw in the recycle bin a handful of graduation announcements from Howard, Jr’s December commencement. I picked them up and saw that they were nice heavy stock with the school’s seal and nice embossment on it. I thought, I bet I can do something with these.
It took a couple of days, and I thought about making a cube out of them, but I thought a paper cube would just be dinged up. Then I recalled Mark Hiner’s book, Up-Pops, which has 3D objects that fold flat.
Design
If you follow the pattern in Mark’s book, it is pretty easy. I made two, doing the first one my way which made the final assembly tricky since I was trying to glue to sides on after the rubber band was in place. On the second one, I used his layout where you put the rubber band in after all but one edge is glued and then the rubber band snaps it shut. Just gently pull it open and glue the last edge.
The picture above shows the layout before gluing it up. All the edges were glued except the two right edges which meet then the cube is created. (The diagonal cuts are not glued edges.)
The green square is the template I used to cut out all the pieces to ensure they were all exactly the same shape and square. Since it was on pretty heavy stock, I scored all the folds and used a bone folder to really make the crease hard.
Once together, by pressing two of the edges together, the cube flattens out. Then when released it jumps up, as shown at the top.
This was a fun little afternoon project. I gave one to Howard, Jr. and one to his Mom. I hope they enjoy them.
