Pop Up Adirondack Retirement Card

Not too long ago I picked up a couple adirondack chair dies, thinking they would be perfect for making fun retirement or vacation cards. Lol, now that I'm in the phase of life where I make more retirement cards than wedding or baby shower cards, I figured my purchases were justified.                                      I kept the front of my card very simple, creating a beach scene using Lawn Fawn's Stitched Hillside border for the sand and a cloud patterned paper for the sky. I used a stitched rounded rectangle die to cut it out and added die cuts of palm trees and my first adirondack beach chair. "Happy Retirement" sentiment was computer generated using Brisk font.

On the inside, I added a pop up adirondack chair put together by using  Karen Burniston's die with the same name. 

This adirondack chair pop up is easy to install because the die cuts the chair directly from the card background. Things get a little tricky though, if you want a chair that's a different color or print than the background. In my case, I wanted the background to be sand, palm trees, and sky and the chair to be white, so that involved a few extra steps which are explained very well in Karen Burniston's assembly tutorial for this die.

 

I added a pair of sunglasses and flipflops paper pieced with cut files created from free clipart, and a cool drink created from a freebie cut file from Cre8tive Cutz. The drink was attached to the chair arm by attaching a piece of acetate to the bottom of the glass and threading it through a slit made in the arm. Thank you, Karen Aicken of Painted Mountain Cards blog for the advice on that!

I used the Lawn Fawn Stitched Hillside die to cut another strip of sand colored paper to create a pocket on the backside of the card as well as a simple gift card holder. Sea shells were cut from very old Quickutz dies.

I had lots of fun creating my first adirondack pop up chair card. I've been seeing many adorable cards that other crafters have made with this die where they have propped cute little critters up in the chair... can't wait to give that a try too!