Christmas and birthday cards for December
Ideas
As usual, November is a busy time for making pop-ups: the regular December card (next blog post coming soon), a birthday card, and this year we added two lucky folks to our pop-up Christmas card list making it fourteen!
The mice have been helping with the birthday card, and I hoped they’d help again this year. But there was a government shutdown, and the mice were not getting paid and went on strike. So this year, no mice were involved with the birthday card. In addition, the colorists were also on strike, so this card is black and white. I thought I’d show the mice on strike in front of two buildings: one that harks back to my name, and another for “Don’t Look Here,” which is usually hidden somewhere on every pop-up.
I made the Wardinkle Building more classical in style, with a doorman out front. The “Don’t Look Here” building is a glass-and-steel box.
The origin of “Don’t Look Here” is from one of the very first pop-up cards I made, which was for my nephew. It had a figure riding a mountain bike, which moved up a hill as the card opened. There was a part of the mechanism that you could easily see that should have been hidden better. To remedy that, I put “Don’t Look Here” on it. Since then, I’ve secreted it on every pop-up (if I can remember).
First don’t look here
I keep a list of all Christmas card designs over the years and try to do something different each time. I had penguins penciled in for this year, and that’s what I ended up doing. I thought of different ways to show them, and settled on three of them standing on a chunk of ice.
The list of Christmas cards on on the Opus page.
Designs
Christmas Card
Since I make more than a dozen of these cards, I keep the design simple to make assembly easier. This year’s card was printed out, then cut by the Silhouette Cameo. The mechanism is a single piece, so I didn’t have any pieces to glue on. The Silhouette Cameo did the cuts and scored any mountain folds (like at the top of the penguins). I scored the sixteen other folds (like at the base of the penguins) on the back by hand.
Ready for assembly
After that, I could carefully coax the folds in the right directions to fold the mechanism flat. Here’s the side view of the card.
Side view
And here’s all of them ready for final assembly.
All folded
The inner mechanism is about ½” smaller than the outer card to give it a border all around. The corners are rounded to give it a finished look.
The cover penguin was printed and cut by the Silhouette Cameo as well. I glued it on the front, then glued the inner mechanism to the inside of the card to complete the build.
Birthday Card
The mechanism for this card is the same as for the Christmas card, the parallelogram. And like the Christmas card, the inner mechanism is one piece. Although very simple, I used the Silhouette Cameo to cut out the mechanism for reasons which will soon be apparent.
Here’s its side view, and you can see the similarity to the Christmas card.
Side view
This card has a secret message when a light is shone through the cover.
Secret message
For this to work, I added a cutout of the numbers and the text behind each building. I had the Silhouette Cameo cut out the numbers and text from cardstock, then glued each piece behind each building.
Backlight templates
Notice that there are pieces inside the 8 and many of the letters that need to be added to make them look like when they’re printed. To align the inner parts of the 8, I used its throw-away part to align the two inner pieces.
Aligning the inner parts of the 8
And here’s the finished 8 with the inner parts glued on. For the B, D, As, and Ps, I eyeballed the alignment since they were so small.
The inner parts glued on
I initially thought of having a hole in the cover that you could shine a flashlight through, but it didn’t light up the numbers very well. I tried two holes, and that wasn’t very satisfactory. Instead of a hole, I cut a large rectangle out of the cover, and used thin printer paper to cover it. This diffused the light and made the numbers show up nicely.
Covers
The Christmas card (top) is a printed penguin saying “Hi!”.
The birthday card cover (bottom) was drawn by hand (no color, only pen and ink).
Builds
Christmas Card
- 4¼” x 5¼” (half a standard 8½” x 11” sheet folded in half)
- The blue was Michael’s cardstock.
- The white was index paper.
- Everything was printed out and cut by the Silhouette Cameo.
Birthday Card
- 9” x 6”
- The base and inside were index paper.
- The strike sign that covers the hole is printer paper.
- Everything was cut by the Silhouette Cameo.