DIY Pop-up Card

My husband, sister, and I all go to Texas A&M University (Whoop!). None of us are really huge Aggies in terms of participating in traditions and such. A&M is kind of a family tradition, though, since besides the three of us, my parents, grandfather, several aunts and uncles (on both sides of my family), and various other family members have all gone to A&M. I’ve also spent the last 6+ years of my life here (I’m a graduate student), so it’s a big part of my life.

One of the big aggie traditions is getting your aggie ring. Aggie Ring Day is a pretty big event, with lots of activities which usually continue on throughout the weekend (although that’s another story). Aggie rings are fairly distinctive, and I love that just wearing mine starts up conversations with other Aggies. I love that we’ve been in other countries and had people stop us and talk to us about A&M because my mom or I was wearing an Aggie ring.

All this was basically a lead up to a particularly exciting event last month: my sister got her Aggie ring in September! Eddie and I went with her to get her ring, and I made her a fun pop-up card.

The pop-up card was surprisingly easy to make, so here’s a quick tutorial so you can make one for any special event coming up 🙂

Supplies:
• Cardstock or pre-made card
• Additional cardstock for pop-up design
• Scissors or exacto knife
• Scraps of computer paper
• Glue stick

First, I got some shiny gold cardstock from Hobby Lobby and drew on an Aggie Ring. Drawing is not one of my talents, so this by far took me the longest time with lots of sketches. To get the shape right on the fancy paper, I put my computer paper sketch on top of the fancy paper and traced the outline with a pencil – this left an indention in the shiny paper that I could trace over. I then cut it out with an exacto knife and drew on the ring design with a sharpie. (I didn’t add the number right away because I had to check with my sister to see what number she’d put on her ring since she’s planning on graduating early).

I made the card by cutting and folding some card stock I still have left over from wedding invitations, but you could just as easily use a pre-made folded card of any size that fits your desired pop-up. The card actually needs to be a bit taller than the pop-up so that it will fit inside when closed. To determine where you want your pop-up to go, open the card and place the pop up where you want it to be with the card open. Make a note of where the bottom of the pop-up touches the bottom half of the card. Now put the pop-up decoration face down with the bottom still at that point. If it sticks out of your card now, it will stick out when the final card is closed (which is bad).

To make it into a pop up card, I attached the ring to a plain folded card with a couple thin strips of computer paper. The first piece attached the base of my ring to the bottom half of the card, while the second piece attached the top of the ring to the top half of the card with some room for 3D action. Glue one edge of a paper strip onto the bottom edge of the pop-up. Put the pop-up in the same place as the test to make sure the card would close earlier – face down with the bottom of the pop-up where you want it attached to the card. Now glue the rest of the paper strip to the card, locking the pop-up into place.

For the top attachment, fold the plain paper strip into three sections. The first and third sections should be fairly short, and the middle section should be the same length as the distance between the fold in the card and the point where the bottom part of the pop up is glued. Glue one of the small tabs onto the top of the pop-up. Then fold the paper strip down, close the card, and mark where the other tab touches the inside top of the card. Glue it here, and test out your new pop-up card!

I also wrote ‘happy ring day’ as pretty as I could with a fun shiny gold pen. My sister’s a chemistry major, so I added a little pun on the outside of the card a la chemistry cat (The symbol for gold on the periodic table is ‘Au’). I cut the ‘Au’ out of the same gold cardstock I used for the ring, but used my handy cricut this time 🙂