A 3D Beatles Birthday Card!

Ok, so this is definately the coolest greeting card I've made so far. And here's how it was done.

So hubby had a birthday (has today actually) and there I was, wrecking my brains trying to come up with an idea for a cool birthday card to make. As I happened to stumble upon a fabulous pop up blog, my problem was solved. Shira Ganany's beautiful blog - The Little Green Box - is all about her perfectly crafted paper goodies with tutorials to match. It was there that I've discovered the magic of the Diorama - a brilliant 3D pop-up greeting card! In the link above you can see the full elaborate tutorial, I'll just give the quick gist of it here.

So now that I had the form worked out, I needed content. Since hubby is a Beatles fan (understatement) I decided that nothing could be more perfect than having the Fab Four wishing him a very happy birthday.

The first step was finding caricatures of the Beatles, which I have found here. The next step was building the frame and coloring it (in photoshop, of course) which ended up looking something like this:

Then I separated the different elements for printing, and went to a printing shop to print it out (on a thick white paper - 250 gr):

Since the last time I actually practiced arts and crafts which involved cutting and gluing was in around 5th grade, this wasn't as easy as I remembered... The Japanese knife proved darn difficult and I ended I resorting to the good old scissors.

Then it was time to cut up the frames - three frames of 10x15 and 1 cm wide (in gradient colors), one block of 10x15 for the back, and 2 fan-like pieces for each frame, like so:

After gluing the little accordion bits to the frames and then the frames to each other (the tutorial in the little green box shows exactly how) I started putting in the Beatles cut outs and the rest of the birthday decorative pieces. This is how it finally came out:

Isn't it awesome?! Hubby was well happy :)
Have a great birthday, love!