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Barnyard Foldover Layer Card

farm layer card


I was inspired by Keiko Nakazawa's layered cards.


My first thought was to make a Noah's Ark, with pairs of animals climbing up the hill. However, I wanted to use a dingbat font for the animals, and it turned out I had a much better farm animal set than wild animal set. The design of the card limited the number of animals I could use, too.

The font is Barnyard by Carol UK.

I started by roughing out the hills and then adding the animals and resizing them and moving them around until I liked the arrangement.

farm layer card
farm layer card

Technical notes: To make the design work as a cutting file, I broke apart the hill line where it touched the bottom of each animal. I removed the bottom line of each foot and joined the hill line to the foot. (Otherwise the hill and the animal would cut as separate pieces and fall apart.) I deleted some of the incredibly small details on the animals to make the cut easier. I fattened up some of the thin parts parts on the legs and tails and so forth.

My first thought was to cut the entire design on one piece of paper, but it was oh-so-small. I like the contrasting colors better, anyway.

Download NEW (2018) cutting files: Silhouette Studio, SVG, PDF

How to use my designs in Cricut Design Space

Files download for free. A huge thank you to the many readers who support my site with a small contribution when downloading.  Pay what you wish for the tutorial and to support this site. 
Suggested contribution for this project is $1.00.


How to assemble the card

Cut the two card pieces from coordinating card stock. Be sure to set your machine to score the red lines.

If you don't have a cutting machine, print the PDF pattern, then cut just the hills and add stickers or die cuts or what-have-you to each layer.

Crease the fold lines of both card pieces.

Video showing the fold order of a similar card.



Lay out both pieces, wrong side up. Place the piece with one hill on the left, and the piece with two hills on the right.

Overlap the solid halves of both pieces, two-hill piece on top.

farm layer card



Working from alternate sides, fold the side pieces in.
Start with the top piece of the two-hill side.

farm layer card



Then the top piece of the one-hill side.

farm layer card




Then the middle piece of the two-hill side, middle piece of the one-hill side, and so forth.
farm layer card
barnyard layer card




The last piece has a tiny tab on the left. Insert it in the slit at the bottom of the card fold.

barnyard layer card

Check that the card looks right and the edges of the two pieces line up properly.

Dab a little glue on the backs of the animals and stick them down.

Turn the card face down. Open up both sides of the card, exposing the back side of the layers. Glue the solid half of the one-hill side to the back of the folded in layers.

This is what mine looks like on the inside. The brown piece is glued down to the back of the layers.

barnyard layer card
Extreme Cards and Papercrafting: pop up cards, movable and mechanical cards, digital crafts and unusual papercrafts.