5 Amazing Handmade Pop Up Card Ideas

Level up your card making layouts by creating pop up cards!

I just love handmade pop up cards, don't you? They are just that little bit extra special because of the extra effort it takes to make them.

For a really long time, I only knew how to make one or two different styles but after seeing a few really intricate ones on Pinterest, my creativity was inspired and I finally gave it a go. You know what? It turns out the more intricate handmade pop up card ideas are not as tricky as I thought.

Here are five of my favorite handmade pop up card ideas!

Table Of Contents

1. Pop up and twist

#1 - Pop up and twist

A beautiful pop up card using floral panel designs!

Inspired by this YouTube Tutorial by Teri Pocock, I created my own version of this amazing handmade pop up card idea. I LOVE how this one turned out! The tutorial is easy to follow and as long as you use a bone folder to ensure your folds are super neat, the mechanism that creates the fold works great.

Basically, as you open the card, the pop up bit unfolds into four panels in a horizontal fashion. Although I didn't do it in this instance, I like the idea of writing a message on these four panels so that when the card opens it reads like a book.

I chose a feminine floral design for this handmade pop up card idea that came from a department store mini-stack. Below is the base of my card after I had put it together.

You can see from the two photographs below how it unfolds after the mechanism and four panels are added. I thought this project would be really complicated but the tutorial is spot on and it was surprisingly easy. I can't wait to make more of these in different themes!

#2 - The double pop up

This simple pop up card design is perfect for creating seasonal layouts!

This is another of my favorite handmade pop up card ideas. The pop up mechanism on this one is really quite simple and Stephanie Fischer has created a great tutorial for it over at The Crafty Thinker. I used this tutorial to create the pop up mechanism but had a different theme in mind for the other elements.

This is what the pop up mechanism looks like below before anything else is added.

I used imagery from an Australian-themed 12-inch x 12-inch scrapbooking book for this handmade pop up card idea and added a cute little bunting and some shells to finish it off.

#3 - The pop up piano

Use cutting and folding templates to help you create amazing pop up designs.

This pop up piano is pretty cool, right? Instructions for this handmade pop up card idea can be found on a YouTube tutorial by I am a bird. They have also been kind enough to include a link to the cutting and folding templates in the comments of the YouTube video.

I traced the template onto the back of the sparkly orange cardstock I chose to use so my piano faces in the opposite direction than the one in the tutorial. The template is shown in the photograph below but basically, you cut the black lines with a craft knife, valley fold the blue lines, and mountain fold the red lines. It's not as hard as it looks and you just need to take your time with the cutting to make sure you don't accidentally cut a line that's supposed to be a fold.

You can see in the photographs below what it looks like cut and folded, what it looks like before adding the final touches and what the finished card looks like.

#4 - The pop up book

Pop up books works great with any types of themes!

As the name suggests, this handmade pop up card idea is for a pop up mechanism that opens up like a cute little mini-book. There are a few instructions for this style floating around on the internet but they are all similar to the image below, which I drew onto my card and erased later. The only difference is that I also cut a window out of my book pages (not shown below) so it was more like a window and less like a book. However, I think this would look amazing in book-style with photographs inside.

The horizontal solid lines are cut with a craft knife and the dotted vertical lines are folded either into a valley or a mountain fold.

You can get an idea of which folds are valley folds and which folds are mountain folds from the image on the far left below. You can also see I haven't cut the windows out yet in the first image but I have in the middle image.

The image in the middle shows this pop up mechanism mounted onto a colored background and the final image on the right shows the completed pop up card before the sentiment is written.

#5 - Simple pop up

This simple pop up layout works well with small embellishments.

This simple pop up mechanism is probably one of the most well-known handmade pop up card ideas around and it's super easy. I love how versatile it is as you can really decorate it how you please. The image below on the far left shows the cutting marks, the image in the middle shows the pop up mechanism and the image on the far right shows the final product.

So there we have it, five great handmade pop up card ideas for you to try yourself (if you haven't already). I hope that you've been inspired to try one of these pop up card ideas for yourself and we would love to see what you come up with.

Happy card making!

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