Disembodied Yule Hand Card

My first attempt at making pop-up Christmas cards this year was a complete failure. I ended up with an odd looking disembodied yule hand instead of the elegant card I had originally envisioned.

The boo-boo card seemed to strike a chord, so I set about redesigning the thing. Hallmark probably won't be beating a path to my door, but I thought it came out pretty cool.



This is the straight-on view as the recipient opens the card. The inside greeting and signature are, "The Disembodied Yule Hand wishes you a very surreal holiday season. Very oddly yours, Speck"

It's simple, yet odd, but the photo doesn't show the cool disembodiedness of the hand floating in mid-air.





A little different angle with shadows shows how much the hand pops off the surface of the card.





This effect was created using 3/4" risers in the middle and on each end of the hand. As the card is opened the risers will move to become perpendicular to the hand and to the surface of the card.

The critical part of this card is gluing the risers ABSOLUTELY parallel to each other and to the fold of the card. If they are slightly askew the card won't fold flat (either open or closed) or the hand will tear away from the card. This photo shows the little risers and the multiple facets of the snowflake.





Here you can see (using a little time/action forward imagination) how the whole thing will fold completely flat in the card. The risers push the hand up and away from the main fold of the card as it closes.



I was tooooo pleased with the result. I was doing the Pink Bunny Slipper Happy Dance in my computer nest, waving the card around and making little squeally noises. Hubby was giving me the wary bonkers eye, as in "she's really gone bonkers this time."

I get that a lot.

How To Design a Christmas Card in 4000 Easy Steps, Part 2

(Continued from Part 1)

OK, there is a part of me that likes the Disembodied Yule Hand card...the same part of me that appreciates The Far Side. I have a few truly disturbed friends who would get the humor and appreciate the card, but Great Aunt Mildred, not so much.

So at this point the Yule Hand card is in the scrap pile. And the scrap pile is beginning to resemble a huge snowdrift bordering on avalanche. The desk has piles of trials and errors, the floor is littered with paper scraps and little snowflakes, and the trashcan is overflowing. And I've got nothing to show for it. Nuthin'.

Is there any way I can salvage any of this? Well, I could revert back to the paper ornament in a nice card. I like the little snowflake punch thingy. I'll make the ornament out of those. It would be on the small side, but with a little bit of string maybe it will work.

Up to this point I've been making the 3D snowflakes using the slice and jam method. There's probably a proper term for this but I don't know it. Slice halfway through the middle of two flakes, flip one, then slide them together. That was enough for the card, but the ornament would need to be meatier. To add two more sides I would have to glue three flakes together. This would entail scoring these little teensy flakes.

Sidenote: In paper engineering, folds must be scored to make them sharp and precise. If the paper is bent in half then mashed down, the fold gets all higgledy-piggledy. You have to use a tool that is thin and sturdy enough to indent the paper fibers without cutting into them. I use an old letter opener. Scoring is especially critical when using cardstock since it is thick and stiff; it doesn't fold well at all.

I managed to get the flakes scored and glued together. Then I spent ten minutes picking out the little fronds with a needle to make it pretty. It was tedious because they kept getting tangled. Here is the result:



Two problems with this. One, it is teensy, only 1/2". It might fall out of the card flattened and the recipient might never see it. Two, NOBODY is going to spend the time to pick it apart and fluff it up. They would just toss it.

Sigh. I got nuthin'

I like the idea of a snowflake ornament, but I don't want to hand-cut a bazillion them then glue 'em together. There is a small school/teacher supply store here that I've never visited. I know by word-of-mouth they don't carry traditional scrapbooking crap, but it was worth a try. I haul myself downtown.

The school supply place has no punches whatsoever. The closest thing to die-cuts they carry are bulletin board making kits. The choices were a package of (24) 6" metallic sparkle snowflakes that were pretty gaudy, or a winter scene bulletin board kit that included some small snowflakes. I ended up buying both. Now I have to find somewhere to ditch a 3-foot polar bear and a penguin on ice skates.

Back home I start with the metallic snowflake die-cuts. Using three, I score them down the middle, then glue them back to back to back making a three-pronged ornament.



Three problems with this guy. One, it is too large to go in the card. I should have checked that first thing. Two, it is...well...gaudy. It would be great on a Grade 3 bulletin board, but not here. I tried punching holes in it with a paper punch thinking it would make it lacier looking or something, but it turned out neither lacy nor something. Third, the die-cut is not symmetrical. When the flakes were glued together, the white edges peeped out all over. I tried cutting them off and ran into another problem. Where I twisted the scissors around a curve, it pulled off the metallic stuff and left a big chunk of the supporting white cardstock base showing. This option was not working for me at all. Auf! says Heidi.

On to the polar bear snowflakes. There are two sizes, 2.5" and 3.5". I score and fold three big ones to make a mock-up. I don't glue them because I might need to use them again later. There aren't very many of the big ones. Result:



I can tell right away I'll have the same problem with these as I did with the metallic ones. The die-cut is not symmetrical. You can see the white backing peeking out on the lower left edge.

Not a problem. I can scan these, print, rough cut, score, fold, crease, glue, then cut around them so everything is even. (Yes, there is a reason I repeat all the steps every time.)

I like the big ones so I put six on the copy machine. Crap, managed to cut one of 'em off. That's OK, there are three I can use for a prototype. Cut, score, fold, crease, and glue together.

Problem: The graphic is not symmetrical. One arm is a little higher or lower than the opposing arm. If I cut perfectly around the graphic on one side, the graphic on the other side has parts lopped off and looks tacky.



I ponder on this awhile and decide to search the Internet for a nice, clean GIF. I found only one I liked. Pulled it into Paint and fidgeted around with it a while, added some color, printed it and decided I didn't like it. I'm now stuck again. I really liked the polar bear snowflakes, but how to make them work? They were a freehand looking design; it would be tough to work with.

I had a flash of inspiration. I would scan in one flake, erase one side, then duplicate the remaining side, flip it, then marry the two back together using Paint. The flake wouldn't be symmetrical for all six arms, but it would be symmetrical right and left. As long as I paid attention to the "top" and "bottom" of the flake I could make it work.

I scanned in the little flake this time. I think the larger one is too big. Tried my idea and it worked like a charm. I pulled the image into Word, sized it and duplicated it six times on a page. Printed, rough cut, scored, folded, creased, glued. Then I had to cut around all three sections to get the edges perfect. It looked great! Success!



But there's a problem. It's just laying there like a dead fish on its side. Even though these paper googahs are ornaments, nobody ever puts them on the tree. They are usually lined up on the mantle with the past years' models out there too. It won't look pretty laying up there like chum. Sigh. Back to the drawing board.

Since my snowflake was pointy on the bottom, I was perplexed for a while as to what to do. Hummm...if I rotated it a quarter turn, the pointy ends would be facing east and west and two arms would be down as legs. That would work. I thought more sides would look better too, so I tried that as well. Print flakes, rough cut, score, fold, crease, glue. Cut around the four sides. The result:



Well, first off the four sides idea is "Auf". That looks horrible. It needs to be six-sided if anything, and I am NOT going to do all the work that requires. The second yuck is my once charming and delicate snowflake now looks short, squatty and ugly. Big sigh. Back to the original pointy ones. Will have to ponder on that some more.

So I print, rough cut, score, fold, crease, glue and cut out the first two flakes. I need to write "Merry Christmas", "from Speck", and "2007" on the three sides. It needs to be written in blue since the flake is blue. And the pen needs to be superfine point to write in the little circular middle.

Problem: The only thing I own that fine in blue is a Sharpie. Sharpies bleed over time and will ruin a project. (Know your materials!) Since folks tend to drag these googahs out year after year, they need to look nice for a few years anyway. The only other alternative I can think of is a blue ink pen. I hate blue ink pens and so does Hubby. He does end up coming home with one every now and again and they get thrown in the pen drawer. I dig through the pen drawer and find one, and it happens to be ultra fine. Excellent! Problem: I write my little words on the first two flakes and the pen ink somehow cheapens them. They don't look as nice as I had imagined.

Hummm...what to do. Oh! What if I could paste a digital photo in the center instead of the writing? That would be cool. I spent the next 30 minutes going through all my photos and couldn't find one of me that didn't suck. I settled on a so-so one and pulled it into Paint with the snowflake. By the time I reduced it enough to fit in the circle, it had pixelated so badly I was hardly recognizable. That might not have been such a bad thing after all. Anyway, I tried for a while to figure out how to make a circular crop in Paint. I know there is a way, I just haven't been able to find it. I finally abandoned this idea after an hour. Back to the handwriting idea.

Wait a minute! I wrote on the 2005 trees with gels pens. Lemme see if I can find those. Maybe they haven't dried up yet. Woo Hoo! Found them in the bottom of the drawer and there is a blue one with a micro tip. YES! Wrote on the next two with the gel pen and they looked splendiferous.

Problem: (isn't there always???) It was extremely difficult to write on the flake after it had been assembled. Note to self: Write on them before rough cutting. Better yet, write on them before scoring. It's hard to write with a big groove down the center of the surface.

Better yet, score before rough cutting so I can make one big score down the center of the printed page rather than handling six little pieces individually. Hey, I learn as I go along. Process engineering.

I'm humming along making the flakes and my hand starts to cramp from all the outline cutting. (All the rough cuts are done using a paper cutter.) It's not easy to cut through two thickness of cardstock, plus I'm cutting around intricate shapes.

I have an idea! Big round punch! Instead of cutting around the graphic I'll just punch it out in a big circle. There will be lots of white border, but the time savings and hand cramp savings would be phenomenal. I punched out three flakes and glued them together. (Even I am tired of repeating all the steps now. It's exhausting me to type them.) The result:



Two problems with this method. First the punch isn't quite large enough to get all the graphic in the circle. The tips of all six arms got lopped off. I could go back and resize the graphic, but then it would be too small. Second, the plain circle is just plain. The snowflake lost the charm of time-intensive, labor-of-love, handmade craftsmanship. If it loses that, what's the point of doing it? I want my googahs to be special.

Ohhhh. But then I had an ADD moment. I could use the big circle punch and make some neat, but plain, ornaments rather quickly. I drug out the crappy cards again. Since I had purchased three boxes, I had three of every design. I had already designated the Santa ones as photo mailers because they were ugly. But they would be fine for this experiment. Worked like a charm. The result:



The paper clips are just there to make them stand up for the photo. I wanted to show that with precision folding, the ornament would look exactly the same from any viewing angle, even if you were looking straight down one wing. Will remember this technique for future projects.

Back to the snowflakes... I finally figured out a way to get them to stand up. Make a stand. Duh! A little triangular strip of cardstock would work. Problem: It looks like an afterthought and takes away from the finished look of the snowflake. I thought maybe punching a snowflake out on all three sides would work. Nope. To use the snowflake punch I would have to increase the length of the three sides or the punchout would cut the strip in half lengthwise. It would also make the stand too tall and would be out of proportion. I tried using a small punch with a similar shape, but that looked stupid. My stand prototypes:



The problem with all of these is that they are stark white and contrasted too greatly with the soft blue of the snowflake. I'll have to design a strip of some kind that matches the blue of the flake. Off to Paint. I copied five design elements in the flake, cleaned them up a little and set them on a field of soft blue also copied from the flake.

Pulled the image into Word, copy pasted 10-12 times, and printed out a page of strips. Scored the strips, cut them out, folded, creased and glued. Beautiful. Problem: (again???)The little triangles could be easily separated and lost from the snowflake. Easy solution. I'll punch a hole in the top of the flake and run a length of silver cord through it. I'll string the little triangle on the cord and make the cord long enough so that it will reach to the base. Then folks will have the option of hanging it or sitting it on their mantle, and the little stand will never go missing. Great idea!

Problem: If the cord is run through the triangle base, the base will be sitting on the cord making it unstable. Hummm...I think I have this one figured out, but I don't know yet. I haven't gone shopping for the cord. But in the meantime, here is my (semi)finished product.



Yes, I suppose it does look like a schoolchild's holiday project. It looks like it took ten minutes to make, and I guess it actually did. No one will understand when I say it took three days to complete. That's why I included all the detailed steps ad nauseum, in the design process. It might not have been 4,000 steps exactly, but it sure felt close to it.

"Three days????" folks will ask in disbelief. "It took three days to make a paper snowflake???"

"Um, well, first there was this big pink, uh, thing which turned into a Disembodied Yule Hand...then a 3-foot polar bear...and a penguin on ice skates...."

"What...????"

"Uh, nevermind."

How To Design a Christmas Card in 4000 Easy Steps, Part 1

I got my first Christmas card of the season Tuesday. Oh Crap! I haven't even started on mine! No wonder November dragged by so slowly. I wasn't working on my Christmas card inserts. Usually I'm in a frenzy cutting, gluing, folding, and drawing. I can't stand to send a boring old Christmas card, I have to add something. I try to design and make about a three-inch, three-dimensional paper goo-gah which will fold flat and mail inside a standard Christmas card...basically a paper Christmas ornament.

In 2005 I made 8-sided, origami Christmas trees out of green paper. Each tree had 24 branches and each branch was individually painted with a silver stripe to resemble snow. I enhanced the star on top with a gold foil star sticker front and back. The whole tree was made from a single piece of paper without any glue up. I spent weeks folding the trees, then cutting all the branches, then folding all the branches, then painting all the branches. I made about 40 I think. Sheesh! My eyeballs and fingers were shot by mailing time.

In 2006 I got really ambitious. This creation was a Christmas tree popping out of a box with fireworks. It required all kinds of rubber band engineering to make it pop into three-dimensionality without any effort by the recipient. It folded flat to go in the Christmas card, but popped to life when the card was opened. That bad boy had a gazillion pieces and required all kinds of glue up. I started them way before Thanksgiving, but I only got eight made. All the pieces are still in my Christmas card box.

So, in February last year, the dollar store had tons of crappy Christmas stuff on sale for 90% off. There was a pile of $1.00 a box cards, 32 per box, for just $.10. The outside of the cards had some cute designs, but inside the paper quality was beyond poor and the sayings were atrocious. I could use them for photo mailers, or cut up the fronts for pop-up card elements, or could completely cover the inside with my own cardstock. If nothing else I could use the envelopes to mail my water bill payment. I snatched up three boxes.

Yesterday I dug out the crappy cards. This year, I decided, I will make pop-up cards using the crappy cards instead of doing the paper ornament insert. I think a big hand opening up to reveal a single snowflake would be a quiet, simple, elegant card. Off to work....

---

First step: Figure out how to make 80 snowflakes without having to cut each one individually. (Two would be required for each card to make it 3D.) A craft punch would work. No craft stores or scrapbooking places in this town, or for 200 miles in any direction. Call Nana. Nana volunteers to shop for said punch, or die cuts, and will mail same to me. Check.

Next: Design pop-up hand

Photocopy hand; cut it out; score, fold, and crease appropriately; glue into card. Make snowflake, glue onto hand. Results:



Hummm...The hand doesn't unfold flat enough. It resembles a large pink erection flopping out of the card. Not really Christmasy, is it? It doesn't unfold far enough to be flat because, in paper engineering terms, the speed is wrong. To change the speed, the angle of the fold at the point of pop-up has to be increased or decreased.

Plus, the snowflake is way too small for the hand size. It looks like a little white gnat in there. I can't change the size of the snowflake, so the hand size has to change.

The next hurdle is to get the hand to unfold properly, but I don't want to keep using color copies of my hand and run the printer out of ink. I hate it when the printer runs out of ink in the middle of a big, time sensitive project. Arrgggh!

So, I make a mock-up



Yeah, that looks like it will work. The hand won't pop as much, but at least it will flatten out to show the snowflake. I try with a life-sized hand:



Well that just looks stupid. The fold will make the hand look all deformed. I trace and cut another hand and try a variety of folds to see what can be done.



Then it dawns on me that I've got the wrong part of the hand popping the wrong way. Instead of the fingers popping down, the wrist part should pop up. Yesss...that's the ticket. But I need a smaller hand, so off to the scanner I go.



Pull the image into MS Paint to edit, crop and size. This involves a lot of erase, erase erase to get rid of the dark background area.

Pull the image from Paint to Word, the only way I've figured out how to get something to print the size I want it.

Print hand; cut it out; score, fold and crease; glue into card. Make snowflake. Snowflake doesn't fit into palm the way I want it. Rip hand out of card, fold in different place. Glue back into card. Glue snowflake into hand.



Allrighty then, that's looking right. Now make it in color.

Print hand in color; cut it out; score, fold and crease; glue into card. Make snowflake, glue snowflake into hand.



Hummm...two major problems. First, the hand is dark and sooty looking from the shadows caused by the scanner. Second, I'm having a hard time gluing the hand exactly into the crease of the card. If it isn't snug in there, it will rip when the card is opened. (You can see the rip in the valley under the snowflake.) Usually in pop-ups, all the parts are glued first, scored as one, then folded. Since this is a crappy quality card, there is a hump in the valley crease which is preventing proper glue-up.

I can fix both problems. Taking a photo of my hand will eliminate the shadowing. Gluing the hand onto my own cardstock, then gluing the cardstock into the crappy card will eliminate the ripping problem.

I don't want to take a photo of my hand inside because it will either be dark, or washed out by the flash. Out to the sunshine of the driveway I go.

For artistic design reasons, I need a photo of my right hand. I'm right-handed and the camera is set up for right-handed people. So, I'm standing in the driveway with my left arm cranked around my head, with my right hand out in front of me. I can't work the camera with my left hand and end up turning it off about eight times before I realize that's the OFF button stupid, not the shutter button. Sigh. It's a good thing the only neighbor home at this time of the day already knows I'm crazy.

I realize it is so cold that my hands are turning white and that won't be a good photograph to use. I rub and sling my hands around to warm them up. Then I have an ADD moment and take pictures of my garden. For those of you with snow on the ground, it was 80 degrees here this weekend and my geraniums and marigolds are still blooming. Neener, neener, neener.








Where was I??? Oh, the hand. So I take about 15 shots of the hand. Oops, the thumb was crooked funny. The fingers too far apart. They have to be together so I won't have to cut down between them later. You gotta think about those kind of work-saving steps beforehand ya know. Oops, too many wrinkles, straighten out the hand. Too taut looking, relax the hand. Damn, now I have no blood in my hand again. Back inside.

I've had some success taking non-flash pictures in my kitchen because of the fluorescent lighting. In the kitchen for about nine more shots. Accidentally turn the camera off three times.

To the computer to download and review all the photographs. I think only one is worth using.


This isn't it, but if anybody out there in bloggersville can do palm reading, can you tell me my fortune? Doh! Damn that ADD.

The hand image, the hand image...back on track. Pull the hand into Paint to crop, edit and size. Into Word, then copy paste copy paste to get four hands on the page to save paper. Print, cut, set aside. Measure cardstock to completely cover inside of card.

Here I take a turn on the design. I decide to not have the hand pop-up at all. It will still be across the fold of the card, but only the snowflake will pop up.

Glue hand onto cardstock, score, fold, crease, make snowflake, glue snowflake to hand.

It looks weird. Add bizarre saying. That doesn't help much. Add additional 3D snowflake. See if it will look any better once the signature is included. Nope.

In my mind I am hearing Tim Gunn say, "Make it work."

Here is the result:



The greeting: "The disembodied Yule Hand wishes you a very surreal Christmas season."

I'm sorry Tim, but this card is NOT goin' down the runway.

(continued in Part 2)