Tag: Cards

Papercrafts

For some reason, three months from now is a really nice time to fornicate. At least that’s what I assume. I had a massive 5 known birthdays in the last week alone. i.e. 5 people who I knew celebrated one year further in their lives. While I did not go or organise any parties (It was my birthday too, the), I did make some cards for some of those people. I had found some animal print origami paper in my box of craftstuff. Including instructions on how to fold a giraffe. Ok, while I’m not sure it really classifies as origami, as the giraffe is made up of two pieces and requires glue, it still looks nice. I took pictures of 2 out of 3 cards,because I had already posted one of them. The text on the front means congratulations (with your birthday), it’s in Dutch on these cards. You might also wonder why my giraffe, elephant and bird don’t have their own print. Well.. I wanted to change it up a little, and still had some zebra paper left. The bird and the elephant I’ve known for years, out of an origami book I got from my aunt for my birthday several million years ago. I know the bird and elephant by heart, which always impresses people. I’m going to make a giant elephant once I can find large enough paper. Anyways, here are those cards. I did enjoy myself making them, and see more of this in the future.

Card Card

Present

A friend of mine is born on the first of January, which is a terrible day to be born if you ask me, or him. This has just passed but he wanted to celebrate his birthday at some point. I talk to him practically every day, so I figured he would need a present. Even if he wasn’t going to officially celebrate his birthday. So I started on quite a personal project: a pack of cards.

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He finally celebrated his birthday yesterday, so although I finished the present a month ago or so, I’m only now allowed to post about it. Anyway, on to regular programming!

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Now, you might think, cards, that’s quite boring.. no?

But over the past year he has been telling me what he wants for his birthday, this has included a baby jaguar, panda’s, a weird-looking spider thing, Afghan hedgehogs, a fox etc. I don’t think I can ever really ‘get’ those things for him, since some are endangered or illegal and more stuff like that.

He’s also a big fan of magic, card tricks and the like. He quite likes to play games and is always in need of a new deck of cards. I connected those two things and decided to come up with a deck of cards that had cute animals on them. Admittedly I didn’t check for copyright on all those images, but I figured, it’s for personal use and they will not really be used.

Anyways, I opened up Powerpoint and made 52 cards. In the left top corner I put the value of the card Ace to King, beneath that the category of animal and in the top right corner I put one of the four suits that cards have. The cards were coloured according to their category and a picture was put in the middle. Then the writing on top of the card was mirrored on the bottom, like so:

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

The four categories are: Cats & Dogs (with the cheetah, fox and a variety of other cute catty and doggy pictures) these are also diamonds. The hearts are (Under)water, with a variety of water based creates (turtles, frogs, octopi, dolphins etc.). Spades are Wild (bears, giraffes, hippos, sloths etc.) and lastly clubs are Garden (with spiders, deer, hedgehogs, owls etc.). There are 13 cards in each suit, 2 additional jokers (with little children in respectively a dragon and a frog costume) and a name card.

I then got it all printed on matte photo paper, I have since figured out that this might not have been the best idea, but it’s done now. They are not very easy to shuffle, so card tricks may be problematic, but it’s the idea that counts right?

After I printed and cut all the cards (see the corners of the cards in the picture? I had to cut all of those out), I made the box. There was a leftover bit of photo paper and I printed a name card for the front. I measured the size of the cards and gave it a bit more space and tadaa, the present was born. This was a fun and easy way to create a personalised present. I might do it again some time!

Box