Daruma Pop Up Card

For my sweet friend Lorna, who enjoys all things related to Japanese culture and tradition, I created this Daruma themed birthday card.
 

The inspiration for my card came from this super cute Daiso shopping tote decorated with images of many colorful Daruma dolls.

I especially loved the different whimsical faces of each daruma on the Daiso tote, so I scoured the internet in search of cute daruma faces. After finding a few, I print and cut them and used them to piece together several daruma in fun, bright colors. Cutting file for the Daruma doll bodies was created in Make the Cut Design program.

On the inside, I used Karen Burniston's Photo Fan Pop Up die set to install the mechanism for this fun Daruma pop up. 

The Fan Pop Up mechanism is made up of a half circle with six spokes, so I attached a Daruma doll to each spoke and three more onto the half circle. To hide the spokes, I attached three different sizes of cherry blossoms which  were die cut using the Cherry Blossoms Outline die from Wiki CAPS. Flower centers were punched from gold foil board using a Punch Bunch mini punch.

I decided to make a Daruma shaped gift card holder to go with the card. To do this, I enlarged the template for the Daruma body (with a window for the face) to be large enough to fit a gift card, and created a pocket by welding a blank mirror image to it for the back. "Make a Wish" sentiment was added using the print and cut function. Then I made an insert that would fit inside the Daruma "pocket" with the Daruma face printed on it, a pull tab, and tabs to hold a gift card.

I found it fun and challenging to create this Daruma pop up card and gift card holder.  I hope my sweet friend enjoyed it as much as I did putting this together!