Technique: Creative Card Folds - Part 1

Folds are a great way to make your cards looking even more special. Let's start with the peek-a-boo fold first. It is a super simple, but very effective fold and if you never tried any folds, start with this one :-)

You will see it is super simple. There is only one very important thing to check before your start. We need a piece of double-sided paper and both sides need to compliment each other. Like in my example, I have these cute flowers on one side and some poka-dots on the other. You can also see another sample on this Wednesday blog post. So all you have to make sure is that both sides of the paper work together when you fold the corners over. Sounds easy? I have a stack of double-sided paper and this was the hardest task ;-) but I found something that worked.


So for this card I used a regular card base and cut my double-sided paper at 4 1/4" x 5 1/2". This was the end of a 12"x 12" sheet and I still had the border attached to it. Border? You might ask? Well our Close to My Heart paper uses the top piece were you normally find the name of the paper etc and prints on the other side a matching border to the paper. Clever isn't it? So when you cut this strip off, you can use it for your design. Well, I just left it attached and used it as part of the front.

Next I cut in to the paper at about 2 3/4" from the bottom and about 2" into the paper. You can make this cut at any height or with any length all depending on how your fold should look like. Fold both ends over and secure them with a foam dot to the front. I placed a strip of colored cardstock to the right side of my card base before I added my peek-a-boo piece. The "Happy Birthday" is stamped with pigment white ink. A little flower is covering up the end of the cut and a butterfly is used as extra decor. A few rhinestones and this card is done.....told you it is simple ;-)

The next fold was really more complicated and I don't think I like it too much. This been said, if you use the fold in a bigger scale as a drapery in the background for your card, it is ok. Well I had the idea to create a butterfly out of multiple pieces folded this way, but to be able to use them this way I had to really scale them down.

I don't want to write down all the measurements for this one here, because otherwise you will fall asleep reading it. I just give you and idea how this fold looks like. You start with a strip of paper, find the middle and start scoring from the middle to the right and left in equal distances. This photo here shows you how the fold looks like at the end. You start folding from the middle in and out until you reach the end on the left side and then repeat with the right side. 

I then opened the folds and cut away a triangle on both sides top and bottom. To make sure the folds stay flat, I folded them back together and placed a strip of red sticky tape on the back. The body of the butterfly is hand drawn and cut. I added a few strips of glitter paper to it and placed it above the center of the wing pieces. It is super hard t describe this fold, but there are many video tutorials on YouTube to see how they are made. This one is nothing for beginners and will take a while to create. 

Well I hope these more detaield pictures will show you how I created my cards with the different folds. One more fold is coming up here on the blog next Friday, so stay tuned. In the meantime, try it yourself and let me know how it worked. Please contact me if you have questions about these or any other techniques. Stay tuned....