Being slightly insane I enjoy anything a bit crackers. I particularly enjoy the work of Karen Burniston, engineer, so much that she has now earned a whole drawer in my cupboard for her wonderful paper engineering dies.
I made the pop-up ball dies as me to send to the grandchildren.
You can squash these balls flat to fasten into a card so that, when the card is opened they pop up.
That’s one way to cut me down to size.
Stunningly lifelike.
There are two sizes of ball, each has trapezoidal dies to make the decoration. The trapezoids of the larger ball fit the smaller ball sides edge to edge. I faffed around with the sizes of a printed-out selfie to get the facial features. I found an A4 landscape selfie fitted well. Then just arrange the trapezoid dies over the photo and die cut them. I used the Bitty ball for me and the original size Pop-up ball trapezoids to cut the A4 photo.
My grandson (who is obviously missing me as much as I am missing him) pulled the grandmothers off his card and his sister’s card to play with. There’s a lot to be said for a grandmother you can squash flat.
The pop-up balls are designed to be decorated as you wish or turned into animals with another set of dies you can purchase. You can find them variously and online directly from Karen and also demonstrations of how to make them on video online. They take a bit of fiddling with to perfect, it’s all in the card weight and size of rubber band. I bought a cheap bag of all-sized rubber bands to find the one that worked best with my card.
The pop-up people made the grand children so happy I included some animals in with their next parcel.
I liked the cat and the short-sighted frog best.
If you cannot pop up in person to people you are missing, perhaps you could pop up in paper to see them.
Search for Karen Burniston to cheer yourself right up – makes me smile every time.
See?
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