TARDIS Card

My daughter's fiance, Aidan, turned 30 a few days ago. He's a massive Doctor Who fan, so I'd been thinking of making a TARDIS card for a couple of years but never quite got around to it. But seeing as this one was a major birthday I decided to make the effort (and I remembered early enough to work on the design).

The front of the card has a TARDIS picture printed onto white cardstock and then fussy cut.

I simply Googled "TARDIS" and chose one that suited my purpose.I had to adjust the size before printing so it would fit nicely onto a 4" x 6" card base (I used black cardstock). I used my paper trimmer to cut along the lines so that the doors would open to reveal the Doctor with a birthday message specifically for Aidan.

I wanted to incorporate Aidan's favourite Doctor, so I posted an innocent question on Facebook asking people to say who is their favourite, knowing full well that Aidan would probably respond (and he was the first to do so). His choice is Matt Smith, so I did some more Googling to find an appropriate photo of Matt Smith and the correct internal photo of the TARDIS (it changes sometimes). I settled on this one of Matt.

I then used Paint to add a text box so that it looks like the Doctor is holding the birthday banner.

I even downloaded a Doctor Who font for the writing!

This was sized to fit inside the open doors. I had a little wrinkle (literally) with it though. I glued the Doctor onto the doors before attaching the TARDIS to the card base. But the A and Y of birthday got caught under the door a bit so I used a Journaling Pen to join the A and Y to look like just an A and then add another Y at the end. If you didn't know about it, you probably wouldn't notice but, of course, I knew about it, haha.

Once I had the front put together, I worked on the inside. I decided that I wanted it to be "bigger on the inside", just like the TARDIS! So I chose a photo, made it nice and big to print out on plain copy paper.

It started out about an A4 size

Then I used the Turkish Map Fold technique to make it fit. I think the result is just perfect because when you open the card, the inside opens up to be bigger than the card!

I added a label at the bottom so I could write on the card.

The trickiest bit of making this card was using the Turkish Map Fold on a rectangular piece of paper (you usually use a 12" x 12" sheet of paper). Thankfully I found some instructions online and was able to do it without too much effort. These are the instructions I followed: "Turkish Map Fold with a Rectangular Sheet", obviously I had to orient it to suit my card that open from the bottom up.

I have made other Explosion Cards using the Turkish Map Fold, but I will probably never make another one like this and I'm so glad I did it. Aidan was very happy with it.

Until next time, happy crafting!