Popup Christmas Tree

Here comes the Christmas card bonanza!  It's a really rough time at work, but a card a day keeps the doctor away!  I'm planning on posting at least one Christmas card I made every day from now until Christmas.  Knowing my posting habits (the lack thereof!), that is pretty ambitious, haha.

After the birthday presents popup card I made a while ago, I decided to try my hand at a popup Christmas tree using the same technique.

The front of the card was clean and simple.  The ornament was punched out from the side of a shiny red paper gift bag that I cut up.  The paper punch is a new one I ordered from the Martha Stewart line.  It's really versatile - I can think of so many more ways to incorporate it, some of which I will show you in the upcoming days.

Inside, however, is a fun surprise!  I especially like the red bird detail that I thought of at the last minute.

How I made this card:

I found a template that I thought would work from a website (if you click on the link, you can download the PDF template for yourselves).  I had the foresight to print one out on regular printer paper first, and I quickly realized that it would be much too big for my purposes.  You can see the size here (the size of the card I wanted to make was only half of the blue sheet of paper):

Since I am not a graphics designer and would have had to spend a few dozen hours trying to make my own template, I decided to chance it and draw it by hand.

So after I folded the card in half, I used a small circular bottle to guide my penciled semi-circles:

This is how it looked when I was finished drawing the tree:

Next, I cut along the curves:

I used a scorer to score along the straight line outlining the tree:

I then used the scorer to help me fold all the curvy strips like this:

When I was finished scoring and folding, the card looked like this:

I then opened up the card...

... and popped each segment out:

When I finished, it really did look like a Christmas tree!

Here is, again, the final version after I was done prettying it up more, adding layers and a bright pop of color:

I mailed this to the Burkarts for Christmas.  I wish I had more time to make more versions of this.  Even though I started making Christmas cards right after Thanksgiving this year, I know that next year, I'll have to start even earlier!