Pool party!
Idea
Although we’ve had a milder-than-usual lead-in to summer, it’s finally here. And what do you do with the kids in the summer? Go swimming! The main idea for this card was a pool in the center with other kinds of activities all around it. In this case, we have our mice families doing the following:
- Playing catch with the beach ball in the pool
- Splashing each other in the pool
- Lounging in the pool
- Grilling
- Drinking adult beverages
- Playing keep-away
- Reading a book
- Preparing the picnic table
- Playing Frisbee
- Using a squirt gun
- Getting a tan
Design
I wanted the pool to be round, and round things are hard to do in a pop-up since they have to fold flat. That means there will be two folds on it that probably won’t open 100%.
The sides of the pool are an open-top cylinder. For the surface of the water, I used a floating plane inside the pool. When doing some sketches, I found if the water was the same size as the pool it would open the pool nicely, but sometimes caught, bending the water. To remedy this, I made the water slightly smaller, but you can see the front and back of the pool have a bit of a fold to them.
My small sketch of the pool was all paper. I did a full-size one in cardstock with paper water to make sure it’d work, but it didn’t. The cardstock was too stiff, wouldn’t open up to a circle, and bent the paper. Using paper for the pool and cardstock for the water worked fine. With the water being cardstock, it would be the main support for the mechanism. Below is the model for the water with the tabs on either side folding down (on blue lines) and attaching to the base. The pool is attached to the supports on either side of the circle. The rectangles are center supports that push up the water as the card opens. The slots in the circle are for the mice in the pool and the slots on the sides are for raising the other mechanisms.
The pool takes up quite a bit of space, so I didn’t have much rooms to add big mechanism on the main fold to fill out the rest of the card. The pool’s left and right connections are two points that could be used to lift other mechanisms. On the left, I have the grill, and a picnic table on the right. Instead of just using parallel folds on each side, I used V folds to angle the mechanisms forward. For the grill, the smoke makes up this mechanism. For the picnic table, it’s a bush and mouse holding a pie.
Attached to each of these is a parallel fold for the grill itself and the picnic table. Since each of these mechanisms has six folds, I used tabs and slots as much as I could since they have less resistance than a fold. The pool and water were designed on the computer and cut with the Silhouette Cameo. The slots on the sides for the smoke and bush go through the paper pool and the cardstock water. It was a bit tricky to get the slots aligned perfectly on the two mechanisms, but it worked the first time!
The mice in the pool sit in slots with a couple of chunks of cardstock underneath to use gravity to make them stand vertically. This avoids resistance of any folds and adds some fun since they will wiggle around as you move the card.
The card was still rather bare, but I found that I could fit a narrow V fold near the front and back of the card. The front V is the usual acute v-fold that folds away from the pool as the card closes. The fold at the rear of the card is an obtuse v-fold so it also folds away from the pool as it closes, but in the opposite direction.
On these Vs I added younger mice playing various outdoor games, and of course that one kid off to the side reading a book. Since they are long and thin they are only attached to the base in a couple of places on each side to help them fully open.
Cover
The cover is some of Howard the Younger’s preschool artwork and part of a humorous pool sign on the cover. I left part of it off to allow the reader to figure out the joke for themselves.
Build
- 9” x 6”
- The base was Strathmore 300 Bristol 100lb
- The pool and water were cut on the Silhouette Cameo, everything else was cut by hand. The pool is on copier paper, and the water is on blue cardstock.
- PrismaColor colored pencils and and Pitt Artist Pens for illustrations.
- The mechanisms are made from 199gsm index paper, which is a light cardstock.