Halloween Pop Up Card: 3D Pumpkin

30 Oct Halloween Pop Up Card: 3D Pumpkin

I finally finished my Halloween Popup Card. Here's the final count from the poll I took on October 12^th asking you what kind of Halloween card I should make. The choices were: bat, ghost and pumpkin. There were 4 votes for the ghost, 5 votes for the bat and 10 votes for the pumpkin! So the pumpkin was definitely the favorite. Thanks for voting everyone! I still incorporated bat and the ghost elements into this card for you guys who voted for them.

I was hoping to finish this card earlier, but it has been a tough week. I only had a few hours here and there to work on it. This pumpkin proved to be harder than I expected. I ran into some software problems where my designs had errors when importing them into my cutting machine. So I spent a few late nights and early mornings just trouble shooting my cutter. As often the case, my designs work well in theory and perfectly in a CAD model, but when built with paper, it doesn't work so well. The problem I had was that the tension from the opening the card doesn't fully get transmitted through to the top of the pumpkin, so the top flaps don't close down enough to form a closed shape. I solved this by using thread to pull the back side of the card down, providing more tension to flatten out the top flaps. It's a few added steps, but I think it works well. Here is what the card looks like:

Outside cover (there's the bat and ghost!):

Here is the card opened:

Here is a front view:

Here is a view of the back so you can see the other ghost. I designed the top of the pumpkin to be slightly concave, like a real pumpkin:

Here is a view of it half folded:

I put bats in the corners of the card to hold the inside and outside of the card together. Here's a video of the card in action:

When you make this card, you can customize the face of the pumpkin, just as if you were carving a real pumpkin. If I had more time, I'd make different versions: happy pumpkin, scary pumpkin, funny pumpkin…etc. There are many ways you can customize this design.

You can view the tutorial for this design here: 3D Pumpkin Pop Up Card Tutorial.