Maker Challenge Day 10: Pop Up Card

As a kid, I used to love making pop up cards with my mom. She was a huge fan of using technology in crafting, and I wish I could see what she’d do with the tools I have access to now.

For today’s project, I wanted to make a housewarming card for friends moving into a new apartment at the end of the month. They have 3 cats and a lot of plants, so I decided to incorporate those into the design. I started with a simple pop up card as a test (I haven’t made any challenging pop up cards in years), but wrecked it before I had a chance to take a picture. Once I had a general idea of what I was doing, I sketched out a rough design of what I wanted and set up the artwork. The cats and plant are adapted from The Noun Project, as they would have taken too long for me to draw. I found this guide at Instructables helpful for reviewing the structure of a pop up card.

I did an initial rough layout in Illustrator to get a feel for what it would look like, and then I set up my cut and score lines. By barely cutting the fold lines, I was able to score them nicely for sharp folds. I used red lines for cuts and green lines for folds. I still have some improvements to make, such as not putting fold lines at the base of the cats, but overall it worked on only the second try!

I still need to make a backing and finish the rest of the card, but the laser cut portion is ready to go.

Materials:

• Paper: I used scrapbook paper, because I had a ton of it around. I’ll get some heavy cardstock to use for this before giving it to my friends.

You can download my design here.

Cat card by Jackie Gerstein is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.