Waves Mechanical Pop-up Card–Review and Template

On 8th May 2011 I uploaded the following post about the mechanical/pop-up card I made for my hubby. I have recently been contacted by Kent of http://paperartmaster.com/ which is a review site for all things paper-folding, pop up etc. He has done a review of this card, and has also gone to a lot of trouble to design a .pdf template that can be downloaded, printed and cut out in order to construct a simplified version of my design. It obviously has a flatter, more computer-generated look than my original hand-painted artwork, but as I said to him in a recent email, if this means that someone actually makes my design rather than passing over it as being too complex, then I am well pleased! The template could be printed out on plain white paper and inked and hand-painted as I did on my original, if anyone wanted a more hand-done effect.

I have decided to republish my original post here in its entirety, to keep things simple, and to bring things up to date. Obviously since I first posted it, I am now using Sheba, my Black Cat Cougar cutting machine in preference to the Cricut, and I am now designing cut files in Inkscape rather than Serif DrawPlus.

I have not made the template up, and neither have I seen a video of Kent’s finished result to see how well the mechanism works, but thought I would post details here for your information.

Kent has a download link for the template on his review, but he has given me permission to upload the template to my Skydrive for free download, if you prefer.

Have fun with it!

Original blog post, first published 8th May 2011:

I haven’t blogged for a while because I’ve been terribly busy with all my projects, but I can now report on a big project that’s taken all my time recently.

It’s been on my mind for some time to make a mechanical card, with a lever to make a mechanism work, which causes movement in the card. I was never very good at physics at school and used to find it hard to grasp the principle of levers and gears, but was determined to give it a try!

I am grateful to Carol of the Extreme Cards and Papercrafting blog: http://extremecards.blogspot.com/ for all the help she gave me when I first started thinking about this card, and contacted her for advice. She is very experienced with all sorts of pop-ups, and 3-D projects etc. and her brain works a lot better than mine when it comes to working out how to actually do it!

It may be the first mechanical card I’ve done, but not the first pop-up.

Last year, much to the consternation of his whole family, my hubby was foolish enough to go out on the River Dart on his own in his little boat – this river has a reputation for being treacherous – it’s fast flowing with dangerous currents, and most years somebody comes to grief in it. While out on his own, he fell in, and he was fortunate that he was able to get out before he was swept away. I was very, very glad to get my soggy and extremely cold hubby back that day – we were off to get my new wheelchair and it took a pint of beer and a sizzling steak in a pub on our way to Exeter to put the roses back into his cheeks and warm him up! He was very fed up because he lost one of his wellies in the river and we have subsequently joked that it’s probably half way to America by now! (My mum and dad gave him a new pair for Christmas!)

I had it in mind to make a card to commemorate this momentous event, and this is the result.

The front of the card has two static waves and two moving ones. These moving waves, and the boat, are attached to a disc concealed underneath, and the disc has a tab which projects through a slit at the side of the card, which when moved up and down, rotates the disc, moving the arms attached to the waves and the boat, causing them to rise and fall.

I drew the shapes in Serif DrawPlus and converted them to svg files in order to cut them on my Cricut machine using Make The Cut software. These have now all been uploaded to my Skydrive (see details on the right-hand side of my blog) and can be freely downloaded if anyone wants to give this project a try.  Here are the images of the cut files I created:

This is the back piece of the mechanism, which incorporates the back static wave.

This is the front piece, the front static wave, and also the part where I printed the text and the fish images. Sorry it’s a bit faint, but I think you can see the shape of the waves. There’s a tab on the left hand side which folds round the back of the mechanism.

This is the upper moving wave, incorporating the arm which attaches to the disc and makes the wave move as you work the tab at the side of the card.

This is the lower moving wave, complete with its arm. You will notice that the second wave from the left is different from the rest. This is because on the mock-up, with all the waves the same, this one tended to catch on the boat when the mechanism was working.

This is the boat piece, complete with its arm for attaching to the disc.

The text, and the shapes of the fish on the front of the card, were printed on the computer, and then I did a considerable amount of inking using Tim Holtz Distress Inks, mostly in Faded Jeans, and the darker parts in Chipped Sapphire.

I recently acquired some Ink Dusters from Inkylicious – these are like old-fashioned shaving brushes on sticks, with a brush on each end. You get 3 in the set, so you end up with 6 brushes, and you can use a different one for each colour, i.e. one brush for the blues, one for yellows, etc. etc. I am very, very impressed with them. Holding the brush like a pen or paintbrush is a lot more natural than holding a foam applicator, and it’s a lot less tiring. Also, because the brushes are so gentle, you can build up the colour in a very controlled way, and you can ink the edges of quite thin paper without the danger of it snagging, as so often happens with foam applicators.

 

Looking on Youtube, I couldn’t find any videos about them, so as soon as I get time, I intend to do one, to show how lovely they are for masking, stencils, working with resists, colour blending etc. etc.

After inking, I accented the waves, and the ripples surrounding the pop-up, with silver stickles.

There’s also quite a bit of painting on this card, but you could cut out the shapes of the hills, sun and clouds if you wanted. The paint I used was the fluid acrylic paint I bought when I was painting Wonderwoman’s poppies mirror – they go on beautifully smoothly and are a real pleasure to use.

This detail of the waves shows the painting on the boat and its occupant, and a touch of white acrylic paint and silver Stickles highlighting the surface of each wave, and also the hills in the background. You will see the colour variation in the painting; this was done by loading either side of a flat brush with different shades, to achieve shading with a single stroke of the brush. These paints lend themselves particularly well to this technique. I used it on Wonderwoman’s poppies mirror too.

This is a detail of the sky. I painted the sun and the clouds with the same acrylic paint. I had considerable difficulty with the clouds, because the technique I usually use is a “wet on wet” technique which allows for very subtle blending, resulting in lovely fluffy clouds. In this case, I was painting onto very dry card which was also quite absorbent, and also the paint dried extremely quickly, so it was a while before I achieved results anywhere near satisfactory!

Moving on to the inside of the card: the pop-up took quite a lot of thought. Originally I thought of doing a V-shaped pop-up with the splash coming upwards, but I didn’t like the mock-up I did. I then thought of those flower pop-ups which open up as you open the card out flat, and thought I could probably adapt one of those.

I found an excellent lotus flower pop-up template online, designed by a Russian lady: http://ru-pop-up.livejournal.com/30649.html – it had been written up on an English language website: http://foldingtrees.com/2009/07/tutorial-review-lotus-blossom-card/ and I thought it would do nicely (as well as being a good one to try out in its original form).

Here is a picture of the svgs of the two pop-up pieces:

I printed out the pdf of the lotus template, and traced around the edges, adapting them to resemble splashing water rather than flower petals. I didn’t use the stamen pieces in the end, but had the wellie instead – cut from 2 pieces of black card from the cut file I made, and glued either side of a small strip of acetate which was threaded through one of the stamen holes in the base piece and glued behind once the pop-up was complete.

Inking the splash pieces gave them a dimensional feel. I also inked the concentric rings on the back piece that I’d printed on the computer, and finally added some silver Stickles for a bit of sparkle and a more realistic watery effect.

Like the text on the front of the card, the text over the pop-up was also done on Serif DrawPlus.

Constructing the card, because I’d made a few mistakes and had to make a frame, it came out quite a bit bigger than I’d intended, and I also wasted a fair bit of card. As a result, I was nearly at the end of my supply of pale blue cardstock, so I had to fudge the middle a bit, but I don’t think it matters too much.

The front of the card was many layers thick, with all the mechanism, and the layers of waves etc., and the back of the card was a single sheet, making it a bit front-heavy, so I designed and printed a back piece with a birthday greeting for my hubby, and glued it on, which added some stability.

This has been a quite ambitious project, but well worth all the effort – I’ve learned a lot, and also had a tremendous amount of fun! Before I started it, I finally managed to get the video camera set up on my marvellous new camera rig (hoping to do a video about that soon) so I have been able to film myself making the whole project. To keep the clips down to a reasonable length, it has ended up in seven parts, which I have embedded below, or you can watch them on Youtube. I hope you enjoy them.

Part 1: Introduction and Basic Construction, showing the first mock-ups.

Part 2: Inking and painting the waves.

Part 3: Constructing the mechanism to make the waves and boat move.

Part 4: Painting the boat and assembling the mechanism.

Part 5: Painting the hills and the sky onto the background piece.

Part 6: Beginning the pop-up inside the card. In this clip, I am inking the background piece, using the mock-up piece as a mask, cutting it smaller as I go, to give a dimensional effect to the ripples surrounding the water spash.

Part 7: The final part, in which I assemble and attach the water splash pop-up into the centre of the card.

It’s my hubby’s birthday on 19th May, so I’ll let you know what he thinks of my efforts!

WOYWW 132 - Bag Skirts and Present Wrapping

What? - we are all saying – yet another week gone by? Christmas is now just around the corner. Welcome to another “What’s on Your Workdesk Wednesday” blog hop courtesy the lovely Julia who organises us each week as our Chief of Desks, so that we can travel around the globe (virtually) to enjoy everyone’s messes and creativity.

Thank you everyone for all your good wishes recently, over my ill health, and over the death of my uncle. The funeral is on Friday, and weather permitting, and my hubby permitting – he says his throat is bad tonight (he had a bad throat recently – the one he was generous enough to share with me, so hopefully he’s not going down with another one…) we shall be travelling up on Thursday (tomorrow) and returning on Saturday. As a result, I doubt if I shall visit many desks this week – when we get back there will be a lot to do. Since I was out of action for over a fortnight with my throat infection, and now having to be away for 3 days, I am seriously behind with everything.

Anyway, to my desk! Here’s a picture of my brown table which is in utter chaos today, with piles of scrapbooking paper and cardstock ready to hand so I could get at it to make my rather exciting project for this week! On the left you can see my big laptop running Make The Cut. My Cricut is out of shot to the left, all  connected up.

On my main desk is a project I completed yesterday evening – a bag skirt.

I’m going to do a separate post about this so I won’t go into any detail here or it will get too long.

I’ve got a bit of a rush on because we need to take the Christmas presents with us when we go to the funeral, to save posting them. In addition to finishing the bag skirt, I have also wrapped all their presents to go in the bag.

I’ll also be blogging about my gift wrapping in due course so won’t say any more here.

One bit of good news – I discovered that my new Black Cat Cougar cutting machine will be coming from Derby, which isn’t very far from where we will be spending the next few days. I contacted the lovely Dawn and she said of course I could collect it in person! I am thrilled because a) I shall get to meet her and b) I shall save myself the fairly hefty carriage and insurance costs (it’s a heavy and valuable parcel). So as long as we actually get there, I shall be returning home with my new Kitty!

Hope you all have a great week. When we get back I’ll try and visit a few of you but I’m afraid I won’t have the time or energy to do too many!

Some Exciting News! Imminent Arrival of a New Kitty!

---but not one to make Beatrice and Phoebe jealous!!

For some time now I’ve been getting increasingly fed up with my Cricut. First of all, I was really hacked off over the court case between Provocraft (the manufacturer of the Cricut cutting machine) and the designers of the excellent software Make the Cut (and subsequently, I believe, SCAL) which meant you could no longer design your own cut files and cut them with this machine. I was OK because I had the old firmware, but anyone updating the firmware, or buying a new machine, would be stuck with the very expensive Cricut cartridges only, and no possibility of cutting their own designs.

That’s absolutely fine for a lot of people who are more than happy to cut other people’s designs, and more power to them – at least they can cut different shapes and continue to make their cards and other projects, but for many of us, that is far from being enough. I’ve had a taste of designing my own stuff and wouldn’t want to give that up.

Also, as usual with any of my technology, I push it to the limits and make huge demands on it! I have been finding that cutting simple shapes is no longer enough for me. I want to be able to cut small and intricate pieces, and more complex designs and projects, and quite honestly, the Cricut is simply not up to the job. What brought it to a head was when I made the Christmas roses for my altered boxes – I used Penny Duncan’s lovely Christmas rose pattern, and on her superb instructional video, she showed how beautifully her Black Cat Lynx cutter had coped with the delicate centres of the flowers – not a single “spoke” was torn. I was really jealous of this! She’s been singing the praises of her wonderful new machine for a while now. When I attempted to cut these flower centres with the Cricut, less than half the spokes survived. I had to print Penny’s pdf file and cut them out by hand.

My hubby was in my ARTHaven the other day when I was cutting something, and he could see that the result was far from perfect. I’ve been moaning about it for a while in his hearing, but didn’t think he was that interested or even listening to my ramblings!

The lack of accuracy and cleanness of cut leaves much to be desired. For example, in the spring, when I made Wonderwoman’s mother’s 70th birthday card, when I cut the window for the box lid, I cut a second window in the box lid lining so that I could sandwich a sheet of acetate between the two layers, and the cut was “out” by about 1/8 inch when I came to align the layers. I had to trim the aperture in the lining, and cover the inside edge with a narrow gold peel-off strip, which actually finished it off nicely, but that wasn’t the point!!

Another example. I designed an svg file of a “bracket” style frame a while back, and used this to embellish the box I made a couple of days ago for my mum’s Christmas present, cutting it in the silver card.

Superficially I suppose it’s OK, but examine it closely and the inaccuracy of the Cricut cut is revealed.

The two paths of the cut file for the frame have moved out of alignment during the cut, making the frame slightly asymmetrical. Also the cut itself is not quite clean, having a ragged edge, and this despite having a new blade in the machine.

I brought the finished box downstairs and showed my hubby, and pointed these deficiencies out to him. Despite my thinking he hadn’t been that interested, he’d obviously taken on board what I’d been saying over the past few months, because he said, “I think you should just go ahead and get that new machine.” I couldn’t believe my ears! Music to them, in fact. I felt I now had “permission” to go ahead and invest in a new machine that I knew would do what I wanted.

When Penny got her Lynx I was very impressed indeed, but looking at the details, I decided it was worth getting the higher spec machine, the Cougar, which will cut much thicker material than the Lynx. For a long time I’ve wanted to be able to cut shapes from mounting board (mat board) which is far too thick for the Cricut, and quite impossible to cut anything complicated by hand. I thought I would eventually get this machine, but when my hubby said that, and with the frustration I’ve been feeling of late, I decided to bite the bullet and go for it!!

A few days ago I signed up for the UK Black Cat forum and had a browse around, and read what people on there, and elsewhere on the net, have been saying about the machine and its capabilities. Having searched extensively, I have to agree with one person who said they hadn’t been able to find a single negative review of this machine anywhere online. It’s beautifully engineered, heavy, sturdily built to enable it to cut with the pressure needed, functional, metal not plastic, built to last and will do what I require it to do. It is not tied to any particular software or cartridges – in fact it was designed with people like us in mind, who want to do our own thing and do it well, without any hassle.

So… yesterday afternoon I put down a deposit on a Black Cat Cougar cutting machine! The model I want is out of stock at the moment, and apparently the new machines will be arriving later this month, and they are already selling fast, so it was suggested that I reserve one with a deposit.

If I had known then what I know now, I would not have bought the Cricut, but gone straight for the Cougar. However, I didn’t know, and at the time the Cricut seemed a big enough investment. As an entry level machine it was very good, particularly as I was still able to cut my own designs with it, but since then I feel I have moved on and require something more sophisticated. I am hoping to be able to sell the Cricut; it has an embossing kit with it (hardly used) and a couple of cartridges (not used, apart from the fact you have to have a cartridge in the machine in order to make it work at all).

I’ll keep you posted about when my new kitty arrives! I’m very excited about it! Meantime, it’s back to the forum, and Youtube, to learn as much as I can about it before it comes. It’s a sharp learning curve and not for the faint hearted but it will be well worth the effort, to have such a superb tool at my fingertips.

Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!! GRRRRRR. Big FIERCE kitty! Cut that out!! Lol!

Long-Case Clock Card

It’s my dad’s birthday on Wednesday 15th June, so I’ve made him a card. He is very interested in clocks and repairs them as a hobby, and he also has quite a collection of his own. The card I have made him is in the shape of a long-case clock (commonly called a grandfather clock, probably after the famous Victorian song).

The clock face was cut from an image that I re-sized in Serif DrawPlus and printed out, and lightly coloured the edges with Tim Holtz Black Soot Distress Ink.

I designed all the pieces for the clock in Serif DrawPlus and exported them as a .svg cut file (now uploaded to my SkyDrive – see link on the right side of my blog). These pieces were lightly distressed with Black Soot Distress ink. The top piece which frames the clock face, and the panel on the main, long, central body of the clock both have pieces cut out, which are not kept; the door piece is sized between the outer and inner outline of the door panel, if that makes sense - when you make it up, it becomes clear.

The door is attached on the inside by a narrow strip of card which is scored down the middle to form a hinge. There is no cut file for this piece; it can be cut from the piece removed from the centre of the main body panel. To close the door, I cut a small piece of self-adhesive Velcro and attached it onto the main body frame and the inside of the door. The pendulum bob, hinges and door catch were cut from gold card, and the catch was attached with a gold-coloured brad.

In order for the pendulum to swing, I attached it at the top with a brad, hidden by the main body panel. I had to build up this panel with two layers of double-sided adhesive foam tape in order to give the pendulum room to move, but unfortunately, even though I cut this foam tape in half length-wise, it did make the space inside the panel rather narrow, so the pendulum doesn’t have a very big swing – this would be enough to stop a real clock! To remedy this, I have reduced the size of the pendulum bob in the cut file slightly.

I coloured the visible edge of the foam tape with Black Soot Distress Ink, which I applied by rubbing the ink pad on my craft mat and spritzing it with water, and applying it with a small brush.

I cut a large shadow piece in Make The Cut (not included in the cut file), copied and pasted it, and welded the two pieces together to form the actual card; this was cut in black cardstock, scored and folded down the centre, and the whole of the rest of the clock was glued onto this, building up the layers.

I lined the right-hand side of the inside of the card with white cardstock, cut from a shadow piece created in Make The Cut, slightly smaller than the main card piece, and distressed it with Pumice Stone Distress Ink. I hand-wrote the sentiment, and added a bit of decoration in the form of some gold peel-offs. I don’t use these very often but they come in handy sometimes.

I think the whole thing has a nice antique feel, and I hope my dad, expert horologist that he is, will appreciate it!

This is the last of a long string of projects I’ve made during the first part of the year, all of which have had quite tight deadlines – I’ve had to work out a timetable to get each one done in sequence, and I don’t think I’ve ever had such a productive time! Apart from our nephew’s wedding present that has to be made by August, I haven’t got any more deadlines until I have to start thinking about Christmas… In the meantime there are plenty of other things I want to do, with no pressure, so I’m looking forward to having some real FUN in my ARTHaven!

Waves Mechanical Pop-up Card

I haven’t blogged for a while because I’ve been terribly busy with all my projects, but I can now report on a big project that’s taken all my time recently.

It’s been on my mind for some time to make a mechanical card, with a lever to make a mechanism work, which causes movement in the card. I was never very good at physics at school and used to find it hard to grasp the principle of levers and gears, but was determined to give it a try!

I am grateful to Carol of the Extreme Cards and Papercrafting blog: http://extremecards.blogspot.com/ for all the help she gave me when I first started thinking about this card, and contacted her for advice. She is very experienced with all sorts of pop-ups, and 3-D projects etc. and her brain works a lot better than mine when it comes to working out how to actually do it!

It may be the first mechanical card I’ve done, but not the first pop-up.

Last year, much to the consternation of his whole family, my hubby was foolish enough to go out on the River Dart on his own in his little boat – this river has a reputation for being treacherous – it’s fast flowing with dangerous currents, and most years somebody comes to grief in it. While out on his own, he fell in, and he was fortunate that he was able to get out before he was swept away. I was very, very glad to get my soggy and extremely cold hubby back that day – we were off to get my new wheelchair and it took a pint of beer and a sizzling steak in a pub on our way to Exeter to put the roses back into his cheeks and warm him up! He was very fed up because he lost one of his wellies in the river and we have subsequently joked that it’s probably half way to America by now! (My mum and dad gave him a new pair for Christmas!)

I had it in mind to make a card to commemorate this momentous event, and this is the result.

The front of the card has two static waves and two moving ones. These moving waves, and the boat, are attached to a disc concealed underneath, and the disc has a tab which projects through a slit at the side of the card, which when moved up and down, rotates the disc, moving the arms attached to the waves and the boat, causing them to rise and fall.

I drew the shapes in Serif DrawPlus and converted them to svg files in order to cut them on my Cricut machine using Make The Cut software. These have now all been uploaded to my Microsoft OneDrive (see details on the left-hand side of my blog) and can be freely downloaded if anyone wants to give this project a try. Here are the images of the cut files I created:

This is the back piece of the mechanism, which incorporates the back static wave.

This is the front piece, the front static wave, and also the part where I printed the text and the fish images. There’s a tab on the left hand side which folds round the back of the mechanism.

This is the upper moving wave, incorporating the arm which attaches to the disc and makes the wave move as you work the tab at the side of the card.

This is the lower moving wave, complete with its arm. You will notice that the second wave from the left is different from the rest. This is because on the mock-up, with all the waves the same, this one tended to catch on the boat when the mechanism was working.

This is the boat piece, complete with its arm for attaching to the disc.

The text, and the shapes of the fish on the front of the card, were printed on the computer, and then I did a considerable amount of inking using Tim Holtz Distress Inks, mostly in Faded Jeans, and the darker parts in Chipped Sapphire.

I recently acquired some Ink Dusters from Inkylicious – these are like old-fashioned shaving brushes on sticks, with a brush on each end. You get 3 in the set, so you end up with 6 brushes, and you can use a different one for each colour, i.e. one brush for the blues, one for yellows, etc. etc. I am very, very impressed with them. Holding the brush like a pen or paintbrush is a lot more natural than holding a foam applicator, and it’s a lot less tiring. Also, because the brushes are so gentle, you can build up the colour in a very controlled way, and you can ink the edges of quite thin paper without the danger of it snagging, as so often happens with foam applicators.

Looking on Youtube, I couldn’t find any videos about them, so as soon as I get time, I intend to do one, to show how lovely they are for masking, stencils, working with resists, colour blending etc. etc.

After inking, I accented the waves, and the ripples surrounding the pop-up, with silver stickles.

There’s also quite a bit of painting on this card, but you could cut out the shapes of the hills, sun and clouds if you wanted. The paint I used was the fluid acrylic paint I bought when I was painting Wonderwoman’s poppies mirror – they go on beautifully smoothly and are a real pleasure to use.

This detail of the waves shows the painting on the boat and its occupant, and a touch of white acrylic paint and silver Stickles highlighting the surface of each wave, and also the hills in the background. You will see the colour variation in the painting; this was done by loading either side of a flat brush with different shades, to achieve shading with a single stroke of the brush. These paints lend themselves particularly well to this technique. I used it on Wonderwoman’s poppies mirror too.

This is a detail of the sky. I painted the sun and the clouds with the same acrylic paint. I had considerable difficulty with the clouds, because the technique I usually use is a “wet on wet” technique which allows for very subtle blending, resulting in lovely fluffy clouds. In this case, I was painting onto very dry card which was also quite absorbent, and also the paint dried extremely quickly, so it was a while before I achieved results anywhere near satisfactory!

Moving on to the inside of the card: the pop-up took quite a lot of thought. Originally I thought of doing a V-shaped pop-up with the splash coming upwards, but I didn’t like the mock-up I did. I then thought of those flower pop-ups which open up as you open the card out flat, and thought I could probably adapt one of those.

I found an excellent lotus flower pop-up template online, designed by a Russian lady: http://ru-pop-up.livejournal.com/30649.html – it had been written up on an English language website: http://foldingtrees.com/2009/07/tutorial-review-lotus-blossom-card/ and I thought it would do nicely (as well as being a good one to try out in its original form).

Here is a picture of the svgs of the two pop-up pieces:

I printed out the pdf of the lotus template, and traced around the edges, adapting them to resemble splashing water rather than flower petals. I didn’t use the stamen pieces in the end, but had the wellie instead – cut from 2 pieces of black card from the cut file I made, and glued either side of a small strip of acetate which was threaded through one of the stamen holes in the base piece and glued behind once the pop-up was complete.

Inking the splash pieces gave them a dimensional feel. I also inked the concentric rings on the back piece that I’d printed on the computer, and finally added some silver Stickles for a bit of sparkle and a more realistic watery effect.

Like the text on the front of the card, the text over the pop-up was also done on Serif DrawPlus.

Constructing the card, because I’d made a few mistakes and had to make a frame, it came out quite a bit bigger than I’d intended, and I also wasted a fair bit of card. As a result, I was nearly at the end of my supply of pale blue cardstock, so I had to fudge the middle a bit, but I don’t think it matters too much.

The front of the card was many layers thick, with all the mechanism, and the layers of waves etc., and the back of the card was a single sheet, making it a bit front-heavy, so I designed and printed a back piece with a birthday greeting for my hubby, and glued it on, which added some stability.

This has been a quite ambitious project, but well worth all the effort – I’ve learned a lot, and also had a tremendous amount of fun! Before I started it, I finally managed to get the video camera set up on my marvellous new camera rig (hoping to do a video about that soon) so I have been able to film myself making the whole project. To keep the clips down to a reasonable length, it has ended up in seven parts. I hope you enjoy them.

Part 1: Introduction and Basic Construction, showing the first mock-ups.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oBJFhZqRd7Q

Part 2: Inking and painting the waves.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DLA0SM9-5Ww

Part 3: Constructing the mechanism to make the waves and boat move.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LveEXdTe2QY

Part 4: Painting the boat and assembling the mechanism.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xaPm2-cne6g

Part 5: Painting the hills and the sky onto the background piece.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pYOKzNEBZFM

Part 6: Beginning the pop-up inside the card. In this clip, I am inking the background piece, using the mock-up piece as a mask, cutting it smaller as I go, to give a dimensional effect to the ripples surrounding the water splash.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3WKU7oIaFJA

Part 7: The final part, in which I assemble and attach the water splash pop-up into the centre of the card.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2SPxixcm_L8

It’s my hubby’s birthday on 19th May, so I’ll let you know what he thinks of my efforts!

My Mum’s 90th Birthday Present

I have been soooo busy recently that I’ve had very little time even to look at my blog, let alone post anything. I have a number of fairly tight deadlines to meet, with everyone seeming to have special birthdays, anniversaries etc. during the first half of this year.

Having pulled out all the stops for my mum’s card, I suddenly realised I hadn’t really thought about a special present for her – she said she didn’t want a fuss made about this birthday but I didn’t feel I could let it go without making a special effort, because even if she doesn’t think 90 is special, I think it’s a great achievement to reach such a great age, and in such good health as she enjoys, and I wanted to make it special to let her know how much we appreciate all she is to us.

We’ve got her a lovely rose bush called “Blessings” which she will enjoy in their garden, and also some Thornton’s chocolates and fudge which she is very fond of. I thought it might be fun to make a box to put the little bag of choccies in, and decided to make a cylindrical box out of acetate, and print a design of sweet peas on it, which led me to the idea of hand-painting a silk scarf for her, with the same sweet pea design, and wrapping this round the choccies in the box instead of using tissue paper.

This is the sweet pea design I created in Serif DrawPlus.

This was a real rush job because I only thought of it at the last moment, and had to order the silk scarves. I already had silk painting supplies, and set to work, beginning with the gold gutta outliner, but it was too old and had gone lumpy, with the result that it kept clogging the nozzle of the bottle, and then squirting out uncontrollably, causing endless frustration and a ruined scarf, and many wasted hours. My dear hubby made a special trip into town to pick up some more for me, this time in a tube which was actually much easier to use.

The next day I was able to start the actual painting. Not only did I struggle with drawing the outlines nicely – my hand is not as steady as it might be – but when I came to paint, I must have left gaps, or been clumsy with my brush, because in several places the paint has bled onto the silk outside the outlines – any proficient silk painter would turn their nose up at my paltry efforts (it’s been many years since I did any) and it certainly wouldn’t win any prizes, but knowing my mum, she will be thrilled with it anyway! I made her one with daffodils on it years ago, and she still loves it and wears it a lot – she is my most uncritical fan!!

Anyway, I’ve had to accept it as it is because I haven’t got time to do it again, and no guarantee that I’d do it any better the next time… Here’s the result.

What I did was to take my original design, adapt it and scale it up on the computer to 36 inches wide, and then desaturate it and use various filters to emphasise the outlines and simplify the shading, so that I could print it out and use it as a pattern for my painting. Obviously I had to print it on quite a few sheets of paper, and I made the template for half the scarf, turning the frame around over the design when the time came to paint the second half. Here is the half-design.

As for the box, I created the border design and templates for the lid and base in Serif DrawPlus, converted them to svg files and cut them with Jiminy Cricut. I printed the sweet pea design on inkjet acetate which has a slightly rough coating on it to absorb the ink. When making the box I put this surface on the inside, and lined it with a plain sheet of acetate to protect the surface.

I inked the base and lid, and the border pieces randomly with Tim Holtz Distress Inks in Spun Sugar, Milled Lavender, Pine Needles, Broken China and Dried Marigold, to match the pastel shades of the sweet peas. I had a terrible job gluing the whole thing together as nothing seemed to stick to the acetate, and in the end I used Pinflair glue, running a thin line down the length where the vertical “seam” in the acetate had to be, and squirted a good amount around the inside of the base and lid, and simply jammed the tube of acetate into it and left it to dry overnight, which seemed to do the trick – I gave up trying to glue the inside surface of the pierced border design. The lid was lined with a strip of acetate to make putting it on and off the box easier – without it, the edge of the border kept catching on the box, which would have made it difficult to use.

When I’d finished the box, I thought the top looked rather flat, so I designed a cut file for a 3-D sweet pea to be cut from card and inked. This is the first “Penny Duncan-style” flower I have ever done and it was fun to do. I made up several mock-ups in plain white card so that I could tweak the design until I was satisfied with it. (Unfortunately this photo doesn’t show it in as much detail as I’d like, but you can get an idea.)

The cut file includes an open flower, a bud, some leaves and a calyx each for the flower and bud. These parts are cut out on the Cricut and assembled using the hot glue gun and wire wrapped with florist’s tape. In due course, once my mad rush is over, I intend doing a video tutorial on this, and will soon be uploading the cut file to my SkyDrive album for free download – just give me a chance to complete my ridiculously long to-do list first!!

Here is the completed box, with the scarf inside.

This is a detail of the lid:

It’s her birthday tomorrow, and I can’t believe I’ve actually finished all this – I did the final bit of silk painting last night, and heat-fixed the dye with the iron, and today I’ve wrapped everything up. To decorate the parcels, I’ve made some little bunches of flowers made from florist’s ribbon, following the instructions I learnt at the last couple of craft shows – last time I bought the starter kit including a DVD of instructions.

I’m not terribly good at it yet, but I’ve no doubt I will improve with practice! These are little white daisies with yellow centres.

These are tiny purple roses:

and finally some grape hyacinths:

Here are all the flower bunches together, including another blue one which I did to put on a friend’s present.

Here is a picture of all the things I’ve made for my mum for her 90th birthday, and her Mothering Sunday card.

Finally, all is packed up and ready to go! I’m so looking forward to seeing her on her birthday tomorrow (actually it’s today now! It’s gone 3 a.m.!)

We will have a cup of tea with them and spend a bit of time with them tomorrow afternoon, and then celebrate her birthday jointly with Mothering Sunday when we take them out for lunch on Sunday.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY MUM!

Soon I shall be posting about my next project which I’ve started – Wonderwoman’s 50th birthday present – I’ve had great fun doing a bit of crackle glazing on a small wooden mirror. I’ve got until 6th April to complete it! Watch this space.