While reading my May 2011 edition of
Martha Stewart Living (thank you Aunt Becky), I saw a tutorial on making a pop-up bouquet that could be used as a mother's day card. Good thing I was actually reading this on time inside of month behind because then I never would have seen it, and my many moms would have received a store bought card. I find it more rewarding making something for someone rather than buying it. The receiver usually likes it more too!
I set out to make six of these cards. Fortunately, I had all the materials I needed at home, so all it took was my hard work and a Sunday and Monday evening. Each card required seven 4 inch squares of varying colored cardstock and a rectangular ivory or white cardstock cut to a size 10-by-6-inch. I think my rectangle was 11-by-4.5 inch. As long as the flower will fit in it, the size doesn't matter. As for colors, I chose pink, turquoise, gold, lavender, mauve, dark purple, and peach. I originally was going to cut leaves with the green, but later decided against it (because I didn't quite know where to place them).
Each square was folded twice to form a small square. Next it had to be folded into a triangle by folding one corner down, then my flipping it over and folding the other side down. Then half a heart was drawn on one side as a guideline for cutting. I had to be careful where I was drawing this as in some cases, I cut it and it became two pieces instead of one. This could also have been because I folded the triangle incorrectly. It might be good to do a couple of tests. Once I figured it out, it became pretty easy. I cut along the pattern and an eight petal flower was formed (see the gold, left). One petal was cut out and the gap was closed by overlapping one petal with another and gluing it tight. This formed the six petaled flower (purple).
This took a long time to get them ready. And by long time, I mean the length of
A Walk To Remember on ABC Family, so commercials were involved. I finished the flowers and quit for the night. On Monday, I popped in
Freaky Friday and got to work building the bouquet. There were seven flowers for each bouquet. I laid it out with six flowers forming a circle and one in the middle. Each flower was attached to three other flowers using double sided tape.
It took me forever to figure out how to put the completed bouquets inside the card. The first couple of times I tried, it wasn't folding correctly or sticking the way I had imagined, so I just stuck the flowers on the outside. Then I thought, "how the heck am I going to mail the ones that need to be mailed?" So, I worked a little bit harder and figured out how to get them to fit inside and be true pop-up cards. Here are the final products!
pop-up on the outside
pop-up on the inside
Visit
here for the complete instructions on how to make this card. For all you mom's or soon-to-be-moms, Happy Mother's Day! I know I'm so very thankful for all the moms in my life!
Happy Mom's Day,
--Am
After dinner, instead of manicuring my nails, I grabbed my sewing kit and got to mending. I learned three things from this. First, this would have been a whole lot easier if I had a sewing machine. Let me rephrase. It would be a whole lot easier if I had a WORKING sewing machine. We have two. One is a janky hand-held machine that jams after two stitches. The other machine would be great, but we don't have the power cord for it. We have everything else, but no dang power source. Therefore, I was forced to sew by hand. Second thing I learned was that when mending by hand, I should work in shorter pieces. Not knowing any better, I cut off too long a piece of thread. That was dumb! It kept knotting and tangling and twisting and knotting again. It was a vicious cycle! Next time I will work in shorter pieces to prevent the knotting, tangling, and twisting. The final thing I learned was that this takes forever (or that I'm extremely slow). I'm probably really slow because it took me two episodes, sans commercials, of Criminal Minds (thank you Netflix). 
