Pop Up {Accordion} Panel Card

I'm excited to share a fun new (new, at least for me!) pop up card I recently made for a very special friend's birthday. For the front of the card, I used a paper pieced portrait of a girl...if she looks familiar, that's because it's the same paper piecing I used for my "Island Style High School Graduation" card. I just gave her a change of clothes and dressed her in a Chinese style dress or Cheongsam which I created in Make the Cut.

I kept the front of the card very simple. Just added the words "special friend" to the bottom, created in Make the Cut using Ballerina font. On the inside, I added a fun pop up insert. Much of the fun of this card is in opening it and watching the pop up unfold. Still photos can't capture this so here's a short video to see it in action...

Pretty neat, huh. I saw this pop up for the first time posted on Little Scraps of Heaven Design Team Member Amanda's blog, a-prata-design. Amanda was kind enough to share the link for the You Tube video tutorial by Kevin Devine, found here. Of course, I had to give it a try!

Here's what the card looks like fully open. Instead of the accordion folded rectangle panel on the original card, I decided to change it by using a row of accordion folded plum blossoms to match the theme of my card.

To do this, I used Make the Cut to create a cut file of the plum blossoms with a shadow layer from an image found on the web. Shadows were then welded together in a row, cut out, then folded accordion style. I used Ballerina font once more to create the cut file for "Happy Birthday" and added it to the center blossoms.

Pretty plum blossom paper for the pop up insert comes from Sheena Douglas' "A Little Bit Oriental" Designer Paper Pad. Pagoda and bridge cuts are from Cricut Pagoda cartridge.

Here's a view from the side which shows the V Fold Pivot mechanism that makes the accordion folded panel unfold and pop up. In his video tutorial Kevin simply calls this card a "Pop Up Panel Card". But since "Pop Up Panel" describes many other types of pop up cards, and mostly for my own benefit, I think I'll be referring to this as a "Pop Up Accordion Panel Card" in future posts to avoid confusion. And yes...LOL...I do get very easily confused!