Making your own birthday cards can be fun. Thinking carefully about the recipient, you can create a really personalised design, choosing colours, themes and layouts that they may like. Making your own card doesn’t have to be labour intensive with lots of complicated things to do, requiring fancy machines. The classic pop up card is easy to make but looks really impressive. It can be customised as you like through colour choices and decoration. It doesn’t have to be a birthday cake either. A wedding or christening cake card can be made in the same way with the right decorations and colours. Here is how to make a pop up birthday cake birthday card.
What you need
- A piece of card (A4 if preferable) for the main card, colour of your choice
- A variety of different coloured pieces of paper to decorate for the cake part.
- Felt tip pens to decorate (find some nice, quality ones)
- A pair of scissors
- A glue stick (you can use PVA if you like but a glue stick is easier)
- You can also use things like stickers or glitters to decorate the cake part of the card if you like.
How to make
- First of all, take a piece of paper to put inside the main card, so that the main card is a border to it. White or light coloured paper works best so that the writing can be seen. This will need to be trimmed so that the main card creates a border. Trim roughly 1cm from edge and place inside the card, folding it down the middle. Do not glue that piece yet!
- Before sorting the tiers for the cake, make some candles that will decorate the different tiers of the cake. You can either use different coloured paper, or draw some and colour them. Think carefully about their size as you don’t want them sticking out over the top of the top tier. Put these aside for now.
- We now need to make the tiers. Take the piece of paper that you trimmed early to make the inside piece of the card. Looking at the folded part of this, mark where you want the top tier to finish and bottom one to end. Between those two points, measure two more marks so that from the top part of the top tier to the bottom part of the bottom tier there are three parts. Next we need to cut these tiered parts. Using a ruler and pencil, from the bottom marked tier and the next one up draw a longer line around 5cm long. The next mark above that draw a line that’s around 3 and 1/2cm long then for the top part marked draw a line roughly 2cm long. You can make your lines longer, as long as the bottom two parts are the same and are the longest and then the lines get gradually smaller. Cut along those lines carefully with some Scissors, ensuring you do not go beyond the marked lines.
- Where you have made the cuts, make a crease by folding them. Unfold the paper and then reverse where that crease is, so that the crease goes the opposite way to the middle of the card. This will give you the pop out effect.
- Now take your main card and glue the paper to the inside, ensuring you do not glue down the creases you made. Ensure the rest of the paper is securely glued.
- It’s now time to decorate the tiers. You can choose to decorate them with felt tip pens. You may find it easier to decorate with paper by covering the tiers. Find some old wrapping paper or pretty patterned paper. Try and find 3 different pieces so each tier of the cake looks different. Carefully measure the tiers and draw them on the wrong side of your chosen paper. Cut them out and stick them to the tiers. To make it look neat, you can make the wrapping paper slightly wider than the tiers and then wrap them around the tiers in the card, so that you don’t see that edge.
- Finally you can add your candles. You can add candles to each tier or save them for the top part.
- Once you have finished the pop up element of your card, you can now decorate the front of it. Maybe use some of bits of wrapping paper to do this.
- Top tip: ensure that you have enough space to write inside the card, so don’t make your tiers too big!
