Another pop-up lever card.

So, the Echo Park papers that I used for the previous card was given to me from Crop Chocolate for being in their Chocolatier program.  You sign up and are given $15 Crop Credit per quarter, and you can use that to purchase any "treat" that you see on their site.  The only requirement is that you submit a project using the product that you purchased.  You then post it in their forum, and then you get another $15 for the next quarter...  get the idea?

Anyway, I created a simple card using the same card base, but using their cardstock stickers that was included to submit as my project. 

 

Christmas in July Series - Part 2

For this card (3 years ago), we decided to create a pop-up card. We wanted to send out something so that when friends open, they would be WOWed and feel like they opened a gift.

As I mentioned before, Robert Sabuda's website, has templates for making your own pop-up cards. We came across a Christmas tree one, and thought it would be cute to have that open in the middle with our Christmas letter surrounding it.

I imported the template into my Scrapbook Factory software program, and used that as a guideline to draw a similar tree, and I hand drew with my Wacom pen all the ornaments and Christmas lights border for across the top. I got my husband to write his letter once again (yes, he has a sarcastic and loving sense of humor as you can see when you enlarge the photo), and I made the text fit around the tree.

I printed this onto a photo paper, folded in half, cut along the cut-lines, made it pop-up, and attached that onto a patterned-cardstock, leaving enough on the side for us to paste in our family photos.

We got a lot of comments on this card, and how they would never throw this one away. This again created another stress for us - we knew that people looked forward to receiving our cards, and that for next year, we need to out-do this one.

I want a 3-D card!

We just celebrated my son's 8th birthday party tonight. Being such a procrastinator that I am, I still had not made a card last night.

SO - to make my life easier (I thought that it would make it easy... what was I thinking... was I ever wrong!), I asked my son what theme he would like for his card. I was hoping that he would say robots, cars, or anything that I could cut out with my Cricut (with my selection, I thought that I would have enough files to cut anything that he would say). Or, I was hoping for an embossed card, or with buttons, or with rub-ons, or glitter... But, he tells me "Mommy, I want a 3-D card, a pop-up card." Well, that was the start of my LOOONG night.

I guess that I could have just made some cut-outs, and put some sort of wire spring behind it to make it jump out when you open the card. My son is a big fan of Robert Sabuda, a pop-art artist, so I decided to visit his site. I was excited to see all sorts of pop-up cards that you can make - from dinosaurs, to snowman, to hearts and then I saw a birthday cake! I was truly impressed with the site as you could download the templates, print it and then cut it out.

This cake had 4 candles, but he was turning 8. I thought it would be easy to make two of these candle cut-outs and adhere onto the card one after another. However, when I did that, the candles folded up too big and I couldn't fold the card. Then I tried to glue the candles and the cake in the folded position, and then when I try to open the card, the candles got stuck inside the cake and I couldn't open the card.



After long trial and error, I realized that there was no way to make 8 candles pop-up. Then it occurred to me that I could glue the 4 back candles onto the card, and it shouldn't affect the card. That's what I did, and it worked!


I then embellished my card with stamps from American Crafts, put glitter on the flame, and it actually turned out quite decent. I was quite happy with my attempt on a 3-D card. That was quite the challenge, but I learned a lot and had lots of fun making it.