Three cards for December!
Ideas
December (well, actually November) is a busy time for making pop-ups. I have the regular December card, a birthday card, and Christmas cards.
In the Kirigami book I own is an example of a pop-up advent calendar, so I thought I’d try one of those for the December card. I didn’t use the model from the book but used it for inspiration. It took a while to come up with 24 different models (the book repeated some).
For the birthday card, I decided that the mice would be constructing the words “Happy Birthday” out of letters much larger than themselves.
Finally, looking over the past ten years of pop-up Christmas cards, I discovered I had not done a reindeer yet, so I went with that.
Designs
Advent Card
I started with the design I wanted for the calendar itself, which you can see in the covers below. I printed it out and then had the machine cut the doors and the “Merry Christmas” text at the top. A red card behind the top gives the text its color since printing red on green paper wouldn’t have worked.
I think it looks very nice, but there’s a catch. For the models to fit on one page, they require a space at least double the door size, which makes large gaps between them. My doors are very close, but it’s a catch, not a problem. To solve the problem, I just had to make 24 separate models and attach each behind a door. Here are the 24 models, cut and colored, laid out over the doors.
Each of the models is a Kirigami (or Origami Architecture) model, meaning that it’s just cuts and folds. No pasting pieces on. I created all the models on the computer and had the machine cut them out. Six had to be recut. Some were design errors, and some of the models didn’t cut cleanly. Initially, I was going to leave them all white, but some of the models didn’t look very good that way, so I ended up putting color on all (except the snowflake).
I thought the models and doors were shaped identically, but when attaching them, I had to trim some a bit.
With the added thickness behind the door, they don’t want to stay closed, even with spacers behind the non-door areas. I used dried Zig glue to hold them closed hopefully temporarily.
Birthday Card
This is another origami architecture (OA or BT5) design like last month’s so not much new to say. There are two main levels, HAPPY and BIRTHDAY. Each level then has two letters that are a bit closer than the others to make it a bit more interesting.
Unlike the other two cards for December, this card was completely cut by hand.
Christmas Card
The animation at the top of this page shows the 2022 Christmas card design. The design is two v-folds, one for the head and one for the antlers. It did take a few tries to get the shapes and positioning right, but it is a straightforward design. As usual, I make a dozen of these, so they need to be fairly easy to produce. Using the Silhouette Cameo, I cut out a dozen of the following:
- heads
- antlers
- noses
- noses for the cover
The size is about a ½ sheet of 8½x11 cardstock, on which I printed “Merry Christmas.” To spice it up I splattered blue paint on the inside and green paint on the outside. Here are all the pieces getting ready for assembly.
The brown, taped piece is a jig for scoring the V on the back of the heads (the machine scored the front) white piece on the lower right is a jig for aligning the antlers and head on the base. It took a good morning’s work to assemble the dozen cards.
A note about the noses. They are an extra layer of paper on the mountain (center) fold of the head. If glued when folded flat, they will make the head difficult to fold. If glued when the head is folded, it will tend to pucker when opened. By gluing when folded, but just tacking the left and right edges, they will fold nicely and rise above the surface a bit when opened.
The smiles were drawn by hand.
Covers
The birthday card cover (left) was drawn and cut by hand. It has some foam under it to give it some dimension.
The Christmas card has a nose cut out of red cardstock with foam under it, also.
Builds
Birthday Card
This was a typical monthly card format.
- 9” x 6”
- The base and mechanism are cardstock
- Everything was cut by hand.
- The illustrations were done using PrismaColor pencils and Pitt Artist Pens
December Advent Calendar Card
- 8¾” x 8¼”
- The base and backing are cardstock
- Everything was cut by the Silhouette Cameo
- I colored the models using PrismaColor pencils
Christmas Card
- 8½ x 4¼”
- The base is 110lb Neenah cardstock which is no stiffer that Michael’s 65lb cardstock, which was disappointing
- Everything was cut by the Silhouette Cameo
- The cards were splattered with thinned Golden acrylic paint