Pop-up Panel Card

Almost a month between new posts. So much for aiming to get here more often. Retirement takes up much more time than a working person realizes.

Since my last post, I've been busy with birthday gifts, cards, another baby shower gift, and of course, normal stuff that everyone does and unexpected interruptions that keep life interesting.  This past Saturday, I taught a card class to a group of friends who meet monthly for this craft. I had shown them this card months ago and volunteered to demonstrate it. At the time, I thought talking them through it was all I would be doing as our group uses products from one company and the die that cuts the mechanism for this card is from another.

  

If I was going to teach this to 7-8 other people and keep it down to a reasonable amount of time, I knew I would need to precut elements of the card. Instead of flower pots, we would use stamps that our group might already own from Stampin' Up. I began working on a sample and had one problem after another. Was it nerves? Was I jinxed? No, it was that what you see as wood grain paper above is a lot of paper under (and attached) to the mechanism that makes the flower pots collapse and fold within the closed card. Gluing that down to a card base and having it remain straight was cursed. First I used double-sided tape (Scor tape) because it is strong. Unfortunately, it is also unforgiving. Once it attaches to another piece of paper, it cannot be peeled off and realigned. Even glue was giving me fits, causing paper to wrinkle. The die set for the project above is from Karen Burniston. I'm not knocking her product at all. I've successfully made some of her cards but many have also had many components hit the trash.

I was ready to give up one night, thinking there would no way that 8 of us would successfully assemble this card in just two hours because it is admittedly tricky the first time. Then I remembered seeing that Lawn Fawn now has a die set that accomplishes the same twisted panel pop-up. I watched their video and adapted the die cuts that I already had to produce something with less surface area to glue. This made lining things up much (much!) easier.

I made card kits of the basic components for everyone. After the assembly was done, most of used Stampin' Up's Party Pandas to complete the inside and then finish the cover of the card any way we pleased. A few used other stamp sets and I'm happy to say that all were successful. Many of us are investing in this Lawn Fawn die to make future cards simple to assemble.

The paper behind the panda is from a Stamps of Life paper collection. The number 8 is Stampin' Up's Large Number die, cut four times, stacked and glued together for some dimension. The card went to my grandson yesterday.