Salam Aidilfitri pop up twist card

HR032

Salam Ramadhan everyone and hello again!

It's already June! That means I missed out blogging in April and May. Sigh! To think that I wanted to blog everyday this year and end up not even blogging every month. The guilt is always there, ok!!.HAHA! Oh well, hope to do better next time!! So today I want to share about what I've been up to the past couple of months. 

This year's Raya card design is all about having fun! Fun means that I just don't think too much about the Raya theme and just focus on how to make it look pretty. Previously my Raya cards had to have Ketupat or Mosque as the subject matter. But this year, I decided to do something that has nothing to do with Raya at all. So it was all about flowers! Lots of them! 

I was thinking of doing quilling flowers, but they are a bit time consuming and I didn't have enough time to do it this time. Maybe next year, I'll be more prepared, if I start really early. As you all know, I was a bit distracted early this year with the knitting, weaving and crocheting, which took my mind off from paper craft for quite some time. When I got the order to make the Raya cards, I had to shift the mode from playing with yarns and focus on paper craft. Somehow it didn't turn out as well as I thought it would in the beginning. I had a hard time deciding what kind of design I wanted to do versus what I can do.

What is certain is that the Raya card has to have a pop up inside no matter what. I've always made sure that my Raya cards have pop up inside. For my Raya cards this year, I wanted to use a pop up mechanism that I learned from various YouTube tutorials. It's the Pop Up Twist mechanism that really interest me this time. I watched a few tutorials before deciding on how I would to do it. Because watching different tutorials means that different teachers will give me different tips on it, so it's always wise to watch more than one tutorial so that I will have a better understanding of how to do the pop up. 

I also thought of my craft punches. I have lots of them. But not enough for a showcase though! LOL! So, the idea is to figure out how to incorporate all these craft punches in one card design. That of course took me a lot of time to figure out, hahahahaa! I wanted to make a simple design, nothing too complicated because I need to make a lot of the cards. So if it is too time consuming, I have to think of something else to do. 

To be honest, decorating the card with the punched out flowers and leaves are not that hard to do and not time consuming at all. The only reason why it was time consuming was because I embossed them. The embossing took so much of my time. I embossed hundreds of the flowers and leaves. I had to do that because the embossed look was so much better than if it was not. So, for the sake of beauty, I sacrificed my time and energy. HAHA! It was worth it though! :D

OK, the butterflies, need not be embossed....so I just stick them on the pop up spirals I made. The pop up spirals were cut by hand by the way. No die cuts for that. 

I think I used about 11 punches for this card alone! That's the most I've used for any of my handmade cards before. I really made used of them this time, HAHA! As you can see, I had to make the pop up twist from scratch. No die cuts. I've seen on YouTube how they use die cuts for this pop up and it's so easy when you have that at hand. But it's also good to learn how to do it yourself. It's more challenging and interesting. Keeps the brain working you know.

Last but not least.....my love for writing my own sentiments for my handmade cards. In a way, it's my way of forcing myself to write with the brush. It gives me the practice I needed. You know how it is if you don't get the practice every now and then, you tend to lose the skill. 

All in all, making this card was a good lesson for me. I learned a lot in the progress. It's always good to try new things and work the brain a bit. Do check out the video of the card below. You can see how the pop up twist works inside the card. Thanks for watching! ;)