At Christmas last year, we received the displayed Santa card from a friend in Japan. Japan often has amazing mass produced 3D style cards. I often keep cards like this and put them on display each year, but I kept this one to hand as I knew I wanted to try to make one.

The challenge for me was I had to stamp, colour and die cut 19 penguins to build a card, whereas the original was printed and then laser cut one section at a time making it easy to build. I had to figure out how to attach them together and be strong enough to stand up, as well as getting the box size and scoring correct. As anything to do with arithmetic or math is always an issue, it took 3 tries and help from my hubby before I got the box size and scoring right. I deliberately went with a larger base as I knew my penguins would be heavier than the original card is. I added a center piece to the box ready for the middle layer to be attached. The penguin and die come from a Divinity Design set. I stamped with VersaMark and heat set in black. Each were coloured with pencils, then die cut, then I divided them into the stacks required for each section. During the colouring process I had been thinking of how I could attach them knowing that the tallest stack would need some support. I ended up using some fairly stiff packaging plastic cut into strips, long enough to attach inside the back part of the box and provide support for the next row of penguins. The image was chosen for the light string they are holding and I glued each light string to the next one in rows while also adding some glue to the feet. Each layer was built the same way, although I only needed the stiff plastic strips for the back layer. When I looked a the back of each layer it looked messy so I cut another lot of shapes to glue behind each one making it look tidy and clean. My gluing ended up slightly crooked, but the basic shape was there and no real tree is uniform, and I decided it didn’t matter. The box base was covered in some scrap PP before I attached any of the layers and it all folds flat quite easily. My sentiment is also a Divinity Design stamp but from a different set.

Making this box card was a long process, but I enjoyed the experience and actually making it from scratch without any tutorials to follow helps me realize just how far I have come since I started making cards all those year ago. I probably won’t make another, due to how time consuming it was, but it was fun to try.

Thanks for stopping by, you and your time are appreciated.

The card will be entered into the following three challenges all relating to Christmas:

https://lilredwagon.blogspot.com

Peace on Earth Challenge #116

MLCCB #69 Anything Christmas Goes