Victorian House Tunnel Book

A pop up card designed like a tunnel book

The scherenschnitte house is from paper cutters , from the Victorian Country Collection book.

If you click on the picture to open a larger view you can see I need to clean my cut file up a bit. See all the whiskers?

The scenery is from a postcard of Mount Rainier. I got it from Vintage Seattle.

I really like these old linen postcards for background. The back piece can be the whole postcard, or just part. For the middle piece I started with a duplicate copy of the postcard and messed around with it in Photoshop until I liked what I had. A little more water...a little more tree here and there. Sometimes the middle layer is better if you use a horizontally mirrored copy of the postcard. You can also use another picture altogether! I put together a whole bunch of pictures to make a Christmas card a year or so ago.

My favorite method for making a tunnel book is here. Notice the use of two pleats on either side, so the middle layer is straight across, not tilted toward the back of the card. Adjust the height of the pleats to fit the postcard.

Scherenschnitte Heart and Doves

Ya know, every time I start to write scherenschnitte, I have to go look it up. Maybe I'll start calling it paper cutting and be done with it!

I recently re-discovered paper cutters, my new favorite site for scherenschnitte (I mean paper cutting) patterns. (My other favorite is still Basteln mit Elisabeth.

Like so many things in life, it's a little cumbersome to wade through to get to the good stuff. What I would do for an index!

I've finally kinda-sorta figured out how to get a good vector trace to cut with Craft Robo, so I've been on the prowl for good patterns.

This one is from the book called Back Street Designs Holiday Collection. I filled in the other half of the pattern (duplicate and flip) and then created DXF and GSD versions for cutting files.

The cutting file is a bit rough. My Craft Robo stutters a lot cutting it and you have to pickpickpick the little bits out of the finished piece with a pair of tweezers. If I were a little more obsessive I would go back and close all the almost closed shapes. But...whatever, it's good enough.

You are welcome to it. Personal use only!

Download DXF

Download GSD

Here's the pop up card I made with it. Tutorial coming along soon.

Window Style Pop Up Card

This pop up card, is window (or flat box) style, a mechanism well used by Tracy Chong and Willem Boning.

The scherenschnitte tree pattern is from paper cutters.

It looked a little Christmas-in-July to me, so I went with it. For the outside I used striped paper I had left over from last year's cards.

Cleaning up the tracing took a long time, so I'm going to make you guys work a little for the pattern. :) Let's say I get...um...how about 15 comments... on this post and I'll add a link to download the cutting files for free. Maybe I flatter myself?

That was fast! Here they are:

GSD file

DXF file

PDF file

Sorry, I took down the SVG because it didn't work properly with SCAL.

Scherenschnitte Thank You Card

A thank you card for a teacher.

I downloaded the pattern from Paper Cutters. (Back Street Designs pattern books/ 34 fantasy collection).

Replaced the sun with the school initial. Flipped the image horizontally. Traced the outline using CorelTrace. Saved as a DXF. Opened and cut in RoboMaster. It only took me the entire morning to do.

I made the letters by creating a contour outline around each letter. (I used Corel, but you can do it in RoboMaster if you have 5.1). After cutting I discarded the letters and kept the outlines. I glued tiny bits of green paper to the backs of the letters to show through to the front. Yes, this took forever too. I should have just cut another set of contours from the green paper and used those. Too bad I didn't think of that until just this moment. Doh.

Another Spiky Flower

Here's another "porcupine ball" spiky flower.

It's much better in patterned paper, don't you think?