By Heather Loney
Last year I made a rather complicated tunnel book for friends, using some pop-up book techniques.
With the NSBAG challenge of
creating cards for the May 2024 meeting, I decided to check out more
pop-up card/book possibilities. Let’s
just say, ‘Pinterest and Google have too many interesting options’ from pop-up
to kirigami.
Simple shapes, cuts and folds
are obviously easier; getting thin strips of paper to ‘curve outward’ was a
little tricky. Google ‘Ullagami (the pop-up on the blue background sbove). There
are several levels and it is an excellent practice piece.
Buildings can be fun, although convincing the paper to fold properly for roofs took some time. Several of the buildings came from a French site called Baud & Bui Origamic Architecture (http://baudandbui.free.fr/oa.html). The Empire building was the easiest. They give limited instructions so pay close attention to their pictures to judge your valley and mountain folds. The Pagoda and the Gift (blue & pink) (below) were challenging, especially since fold lines are not drawn out, and they are difficult to collapse into a card format. It is possible that my Pagoda may have been struck by an earthquake which caused a little structural damage. 😉
The Blue Arcs (below) looked intriguing on
Pinterest --- but in spite of trying it two different ways, my results did not
match their final product. These will make their way to the recycling bin.
The last one is another tricky one with curves and narrow pieces which make folding difficult, is called a ‘Carte Magique’ and can be found at: https://vivelamagie.com/. It is 3.jpg. It’s my favourite but unfortunately with so many thin strips of paper, it is also difficult to fold and collapse it into a proper card.
As the title suggests, I got lost
down the ‘rabbit hole’ and have found many more challenging paper-cuts and
pop-ups to play with, but missed my original goal of finding something
effective and simpler to create 10 cards. These will not be part of my card
package for May – but hopefully they will inspire something worthwhile!