May and Mother’s Day Cards
Idea
Mother’s Day is in May, so Mom gets a bonus card!
My challenge for the May cards is to use the same mechanism in different ways. I determine the basic mechanism to use first, then come up with two ideas to fit that mechanism. Usually, I do it the other way around.
For this year’s mechanism, I looked through The Complexities of Pop-Up book and its predecessor The Elements of Pop-Up. One that looked interesting was Figure 29, Angle Form Platform, which is two V-folds with a platform on top. I decided to use this mechanism for both of my cards, but I realized that it would fold flat when fully opened, which wasn’t what I had in mind. I wanted something more like a box. To find an alternative, I looked through Marion Battaille’s ABC3D and found that the letter L was a similar mechanism, but it stood up straight when opened, which is exactly what I wanted.
To make the two cards different, I wanted to do things in very different scales. For the May card, I decided to make a mechanism that was a building. We enjoyed Only Murders in the Building on Hulu, and I thought the apartment building from the show would be a good subject. Doing some quick searching, I found that the Arconia is in reality the Belnord in New York. My interpretation is a very loose one since I am dealing with a very small version of it.
For the Mother’s Day card, I went with flowers again this year, so the scale was much smaller than the building.
Design
The mechanism for both cards is made of two 90° V-folds connected at the top. Using Marion’s L shape as a pattern, I created the it out of one piece of card that folds around to make the tops, fronts, and backs with the left and right ends are open. I used the Silhouette Cameo to cut out the mechanism. The only difference in the two cards’ mechanisms is the height.
May Card-specific
For the May card the Silhouette Cameo also cut the windows and the arches out of the mechanism. The borders on the arches and other details are also cut with the machine. Although the photograph doesn’t show it very well, I did deboss the arches to make it look like they were made of blocks of stone.
I decided to only use paper without any applied media for color or lines. For the building, gray concrete areas, and dark gray road, I used cardstock. The grays make the base of the card, but I need to attach them to something, so I used my usual bristol paper this time one piece for the cover and one for the back. If I tried to put the folded gray cardstock inside folded bristol, it would have had trouble opening.
The trees are green paper parallelograms attached to the building. The markings on the road are colored paper and I used a jig to ensure proper alignment of all the pieces.
My original sketch for this pop-up had cars and people, but after getting to this point, it looked pretty good, and I stopped there. It was rather boxy, so I decided to add an arched pediment on the two front faces of the building. Like the arches, I debossed lines into it for the stone-like appearance.
Night time.
Mother’s Day Card-specific
To distinguish the Mother’s Day card from the May card, no surface is without some decoration. I used pastels on the base and colored pencils on the mechanism. Mrs. Wardinkle drew all the flowers with oil pastels on pastel paper, and everything except the L-shaped mechanism was cut by hand. Each side of the “pot” has arms that poke up through the main mechanism (in brown below).
To give the layered effect, each arm is at a different distance from the front. After assembling the pot I planted all the flowers on the arms.
The “Happy Mother’s Day” text used a floating plane mechanism.
Covers
The May card’s cover has some scraps from young Howard’s preschool artwork. I’d had these trimmings for quite a while, just waiting for an idea to use them on.
The Mother’s Day cover also uses some preschool artwork on the bottom, with the wife’s flowers and a bit of pastels for the background.
Build
- 9” x 6”
- The bases are made of Strathmore 300 Bristol 270gsm
- For the May card, most of the interior was made using Michael’s Recollections 176gsm cardstock. The white, yellow, and green are copier paper.
- The Mother’s Day card also used Michael’s Recollections 176gsm cardstock and pastel paper for the flowers.