Twist 'n' Pop

I’ve been binge watching fancy fold card videos on YouTube lately.  A fancy fold definitely adds a bit of WOW! to a card.  They usually take a little longer to make but are worth the effort.  This card was made using Sam Calcott’s (of Mixed Up Craft fame) tutorial.  Her instructions are really clear and easy to follow.

My theme for this week’s card was a 60^th birthday for my friend.  She’s a fun, bubbly and stylish lady so I wanted the same kind of feel for her card.  

To begin, I wanted a black and white striped background.  I only had skinny striped paper so I drew some deliberately wonky lines with my black marker pen and coloured them in, several times, to give a rich black colour.

Next, using my Cricut, I cut my sentiment from black and gold vinyl and stuck it onto the panel.  I added some gold dots in the corners where I would later add the decorative elements.

For the decorative elements, I used Stampin’ Up! Dressed To Impress stamps.  I added a layer of Glossy Accents to the perfume bottle to resemble glass.

Now for the inside.  First, I added some decorative panels to the card base.

Then it was time for the mechanism.  It looks really complicated and would be tricky to explain on paper (screen?!) but Sam explains it really well in her video so I urge you to watch that.  I couldn’t decide what to put on the 4 panels inside until I realised that BIRTHDAY has 8 letters!  There wasn’t room for ‘Happy’ so I added in some small panels to the top of the 1^st panel and bottom of the 4^th panel for the ‘Happy’ and ‘Katie’ to personalise the card.  I trialled about 4 small panels until I got ones that were the right size and didn’t drag on card as it opened and closed.

The final job was to glue the front panel into the card base and add some gold-coloured gems for extra pizzazz.

This was such a fun card to make and I think it definitely has the WOW! factor I was after. Here’s a short clip of my card in action.