Making a Giant Pop Up Card

For her birthday, my girlfriend offhandedly requested a pop up card, preferably home made. Up for a challenge I decided to follow through with it.

Now my spatial reasoning is pretty horrible. I have trouble solving those 2x2 Rubik's cubes. So I was pretty worried about doing a good job coming up with a design myself. However, it was easy enough to find some instructions online. This site had a number of options with clear step by step instructions. After browsing a little, I ended up selecting the pig mainly because I liked how it looked and she was born in the year of the pig.

Now the fun part. I like to be obnoxious when giving presents so its important to me that the gift be as unnecessarily large as possible. As a result I wasn't able to print out the guides on card stock like the instructions suggested. Instead I stuck around at work and used the projector to trace the pig cuts on the pink card stock.

Once I had traced the cuts and folds, I cut out all the pieces to spec. In addition I took a piece of foam core and scored it down the middle so it became a foldable card. This was harder than it sounded since I didn't have a ruler to find the middle line. As a result, I had to cut pieces of paper using the paper cutter to 5" increments which when placed together on the foam core, indicated where to score.

Finally, it was time to assemble ... well almost. After test fitting some of the pieces, I was thoroughly confused how it was all supposed to fit together. There's that poor spatial reasoning again. Not wanting to ruin the pieces I had spent so much time tracing and cutting out, I printed out the guides on some printer paper and decided to make a quick mock up of the final thing.

With the mock up completed successfully, all that was left was to assemble the final thing. You can see how big it is compared to the mock up and tape in the foreground.

Overall this turned out very well. My girlfriend was surprised to say the least and I was happy with the way it all came together. In addition to the pop up center piece, I ended up adding a bit more decoration, wrapping the whole thing, and topping it off with an obnoxiously large bow. Here's a gallery of all of the pictures I took.

Technologies: Paper, Glue