Silhouette UK: Pop-up Sentiment

Monday, 26 February 2018

Pop-up Sentiment - Its a boy!

Hi everyone. It's Verity here from Pretty Little Button bringing you another project. I had originally made this project when I first joined the team. However, I had technical difficulties at the time- my computer stopped working, so I never got round to putting up in the blog. Since then, I have updated it and I ended up adding more to the inside, and used the pen holder again aftering loving it so much from last week. This sweet little baby card opens up to a pop-up sentiment and foam mounted print and cut balloons as though they are bursting out of the card. You can easily change the colours of the card to suit a girl and I think this elephant is adorable!

Pop-up sentiment - It's a boy! card details:

To start off you will need to create the pop-up sentiment. Draw the shape you wish for you sentiment to sit on, in my case this was a oval. Whilst you have the shape selected, you need click on the Pop-up Panel icon on the right hand bar (it is a little heart on a folded card). This brings up the Pop-up panel box - select the 'convert selected shapes to Pop-up. Remember to keep you shape selected when you do this.

This will convert your shape into a pop-up adding adding score lines and boxes above the shape, to the side and at the bottom. In the Pop-up panel, you have 3 areas you can adjust: base width, Min. Strut width and Dash pitch.

The 'Base width' determines how much of the shape's bottom is scored to create the fold. The larger the width, the more it will score. However, bare in mind it can alter the look of the shape too especially on curved shapes. I used a small base width for this shape.

The 'strut width' relates to the struts that sit at the top of your shape, these create cut and score lines to help 'pop' the panel out from the portrait background. The smaller the width, the more struts there will be, but the more it will maintain the shapes structure at the top.

Lastly, the 'Dash pitch' relates to the score line dash and how small or wide you want this to be. The smaller the dashes, the more susceptible the cardstock would be to breaking. You can see below the settings I used for this oval.

If you take a look above, you will notice two lines extending from the side of the shape, each with a small red circle at the end. These lines are the score lines the pop-up creates. You will want these lines to sit in the fold of your card. If you pull horizontally on these lines, you can extend their length and match this to width of your card panel. Before you send this to cut, make sure you draw an oblong the size of the inside of your card - this needs to expand the top and bottom of the card.

The 'Congratulations' sketched using the pen holder and this font was such a great font to use with the sketch function. It almost looks filled in.

For the front of the card and the for balloons inside, I used the print and cut feature of Silhouette. I created several different sizes and colours of balloon. I used an adorable little elephant on the front, but I decided to print and cut the ear separately so this could be foam mounted onto the front for dimension, along with the main body of the balloon.

I positioned the balloons inside the card to give the illusion as though they are floating out of the card. Some balloons were foam mounted to give added depth and dimension.

Lastly, I decided to make a quick matching envelope by sketching the outline of the elephant and balloon on to the front. To see how easy it is to use the pen holder for mail art, check out this post here.