Valentine's Pop-up Cards Revisited

We don't do gifts for Valentine's.  No flowers or jewelry, or anything like that.  But we do DO homemade Valentine's cards.  Yeah...they're kind of a big deal.  So we try to come up with new ideas, which is why we tried pop-up cards to begin with.  But,the first time we tried pop-ups, they didn't turn out the way I thought they would.  Nothing really "popped" out, and it was kind of disappointing.  I checked out a book at the library to help...but it was just too complicated.

This was my attempt 2 years ago, see?

Fast forward to this year. We were ready to try again, so THIS time I used the ultimate learning tool...YouTube.  I truly don't know why people waste their time on YouTube watching stupid videos when there is SO MUCH TO LEARN!!  

Notice the wine coolers?  To make the homemade 

Valentine making more fun for my husband 

I created the first annual Valentine's 

Wine Cooler and Valentine Making Party.

Do you know how simple it is to make a pop up?

This simple.

I finished the cards just as I finished my wine cooler...perfect.

Stop Motion Christmas Present

I realize this post is a little dated, since it was from Christmas...but it's not my fault...I just took the tree out of the boat today.

Yep...today, February 4th.

To be fair, I took the tree "down" 2 weeks ago, but just couldn't find a convenient time to get it out of here.  So now it's in my car.  At least it's not in the houseboat, that counts for something.

Anyway, I really wanted to go homemade this year for our family gifts, but I just couldn't decide what to do.  My inspiration came from a friend who has been doing Stop Motion projects with her kids for a while.  One day when my kids were playing over there, they did some Stop Motion with them and got the SM bug.

My friend suggested that we buy the iStopMotion app for the ipad, then import the videos into iMovie to put it together and add sound, music, special effects, etc.

We started by sketching out some ideas and putting them together.  Lesson 1 is that it's harder than it looks to do even some of the most simple SM tricks.  So for your first project, KEEP IT SIMPLE.  I went with paper-sketches for my SM medium; but legos, clay and playmobil characters work well too.

To make it easier, I sketched out a basic scene and left out the faces and arms.  This way I didn't have to sketch it over and over again, I could just add the changes.  For instance, the carol part took 4 frames per person, so 16 frames all together.  The more frames, the more fluid the motion. After I did the photography sequence in iStopMotion I opened iMovie and placed the sequences in a row.  From there we added the singing.  This took a couple of tries to line up the movement of the video with our voices, but re-recording is a snap.

The project was a lot of fun, and with the technologically advanced world we live in, I was able to upload them late on Christmas eve for the recipients to see/open/get on Christmas morning.  And the kids felt very involved and very proud of the finished product.

37 years old

For my birthday, Alaska gave me no rain.

Laurel gave me a walk in the woods.

My husband got me my Yelloweye mug.

My son got me roses.

A delicious and smiling homemade carrot cake.

And a tired husband who managed to get things done even though he worked all day.

I am blessed.