Two Cards for May
Idea
Mother’s Day is in May, so Mom gets a bonus card!
Since the May cards use the same mechanism, I determine the basic mechanism to use first, then come up with two ideas to fit that mechanism. Usually it’s the other way around.
For the Mother’s Day card I wanted to do something with flowers and I settled on tulips. Nothing too creative here. Keeping with the spring theme, a butterfly fit well with the mechanism, so I ended up with two nature-themed cards.
Design
Last year I decided to do both May cards with the same mechanism, but make them look as different as possible. When looking for inspiration for the mechanism, I perused David Carter’s books, One Red Dot, 600 Black Dots, and Blue 2. The first mechanism in Blue 2 is a bunch parallel folds the extend way beyond the base of the mechanism to make some lovely intersecting branches.
If you’ve been following along, the parallel fold is the main mechanism from last month’s card, too, but in these cards, each side of the parallel fold’s triangle extends beyond the peak to make an X shape. The diagram below shows the two parallel folds on the tulip card with the triangles being extended upwards to form the X shape.
The butterfly card has only one parallel fold and the leaves nearly hide the X.
Mother’s Day-Specific
I used the Silhouette Cameo to cut out a bunch of tulip flowers of three different shapes in slightly varying sizes. Each flower is made up of two flowers hinged on the side so they could fold over the stem. This meant coloring 50 sides of 25 flowers.
The stems make the main mechanism and were cut by hand and colored. To be able to nest the two parallel folds, the taller one has a gap in the middle to allow the lower one to come through.
The basket holding the flowers is a parallelogram attached to the taller parallel fold and also colored by hand.
The base uses pastels, and the rest is colored pencils.
Butterfly-Specific
Although the mechanism is the same, the butterfly is at a much lower angle. The flowers stand mainly vertically, but the butterfly is mainly horizontal hopefully giving them a very different look. As usual, the mechanisms for both cards are as large as possible without sticking out when the card is closed.
Like the baskets, the leaves are a parallelogram, but instead of viewing the side, you view the top.
The swinging arm mechanism that pulls up the clover is only on this card. Swinging arms create a very interesting movement, but you have to watch out for them catching on other parts of the card. I was careful to not have any cutouts on the leaves where it moved but did have it catch on the butterfly and I had to reset the flower to correct that.
The base color again is pastels, but all the rest are printed images, cut by hand. The leaves have several cutouts to add shadows and reveal some of the base.
Covers
The Mother’s Day cover is some old wrapping paper for the border, and a color plate from an old encyclopedia.
The May card uses more of my son’s early school artwork, with a printed butterfly inserted into it.
Build
- 9” x 6”
- Tulips were cut on the Silhouette Cameo, everything else was cut by hand.
- The bases are Strathmore 300 Bristol 100lb, with pastel backgrounds and PrismaColor colored pencils for illustrations.