... and Space Invader Pop-up Cards

These cards are brilliant! I cannot stress that enough! Don't worry, I'm not being arrogant - they are directly from minieco, complete with free printable template and very clear instructions!

I'd seen these on craftgawker and saved them to my (ever growing) favourites folder waiting for the right occasion... which just happened to be early in February where it was Dunc's birthday one day and my brother's the very next day!

The good thing about this is that its actually more eco friendly to make two at a time as you need a completely contrasting colour as your background (to make the image really pop), and you print out both the inner piece and the backing piece onto one sheet of A4 card - so you can just swap them over!

As I've said, the instructions are brilliant - really easy to follow and colour coded for the parts you score, and the parts you cut. I used a compass for my score lines... in retrospect something a bit smoother like a blunt edged embroidery needle would be better as I had to make sure I didn't scratch into it...

After folding and scoring in the right places, you gently ease the card to make sure the folds are going in or out to make the image pop out. This bit is a bit fiddly but you get there in the end!

Then, its just a case of sticking this piece on to the contrasting backing piece:

I improvised the last bit by finding a spacey/roboty "happy birthday" image from Google. (I don't have lots of different fonts but obviously you could do it in this way if you did!)

 And here's the finished product! Word of warning - it may seem obvious to those observant ones out there (and its why I took the picture on the cutting mat!!) but these come out very small! This was a shock to me, but I went with them anyway because they are sooooooooooooooooo cute!!! There's even a printable template on the post for you to have an exact sized envelope. Here's the link again: click here

On the post, there's also instructions for a skull pop-up and the site contains loads of brilliant other things. Thanks minieco! xx