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Hallowienie Mechanical Card


What happens when you take a dog pull-tab card idea from Martha and mash it with a pin-the-tail-on-the-Sparky Frankenweenie printable? A Frankencard? It's my favorite kind of project: a serendipitous sythesis!



The bad news: For copyright reasons, I can't distribute a printable of the finished card. (All images remain the property of the original copyright holder. This project is for personal, home use only.)
The good news: if you know your way around drawing and photo editing software, it's not so hard to replicate.
Here's how!
Photo manipulation
Download the Sparky game from here.
Stitch the pages together in a photo editing program. Remember to attach a tail!
Select around the head. Cut and paste it into a new document. Make the background transparent.
Fill in the neck area with a clone from the back leg. You will have to darken it a bit to blend with the body. This doesn't have to be beautiful, just unobtrusive. It's only barely visible as the head turns from side to side.


Select around the dog and cut and paste it into a new document, with a transparent background, OR remove the background from the current document.
Adding the dog to the card file
Download my card file and open it in a drawing program.
Drop or import the dog body onto page 1 and resize it to fit the red guideline. Delete the guideline.
Drop or import the dog head onto page 2 and resize it as well. Delete the guideline.
Print.
Assemble the card
Using a straight edge across the guidelines, trace the crosshairs onto the back side of the dog head. I used my computer monitor as a makeshift lightbox.



Cut out all the pieces.
Score and crease the grey edge at the top and bottom of the card front.
Cut out the circle on the neck of the dog on page 1.

Fasten the linkage pieces together with a paper fastener.

Clip off the long ends of the paper fastener and tape the ends to the linkage.

Fasten linkage to pull tab with paper fastener. Tape the ends of the paper fastener to the tab.


Fold and glue the long rectangle into a band. This is the tab stopper that keeps the tab from pulling too far out of, or pushing too far into the card.


Glue it to the wrong side of the card. It should be close to, but not right in, the crease of the card. The folded end lines up with the tab cut out, about 1.125" in from the side of the card.

Crease the shorter rectangle into the second stopper. Glue to the back of the card with the fold lined up with the tab cut out, near the crease of the other long edge of the card, as with the other stopper. (Scroll down three pictures to see this in place.)
Insert the flanges of the linkage through the circular hole in the card, from the back side of the card through to the front side. (Yours will not have a dot and a "C", by the way. Martha's card has an additional paper fastener here, which I omitted.)


Slide the tab into the stoppers.

Flip the card to the front (right) side. Push the tab so it is in "rest" position--lined up with the right-hand, short side of the card.
Spread a small amount of glue on the flanges--ONLY on the flanges--that are protruding through the hole on the front side of the card. Look carefully at the picture to line up the head. The crosshairs should be right in the center of the circle, but it's hard to get a view of them from the right side. (I pull the edges of the head up and peer in and just guess a little. You could also stick a pin through the center of the flange piece, and then through the head to line them up, but it leaves a little hole.)


Glue the back to the card. Be careful! The pull tab cut-out is not centered on the card. Be sure you have matched top-to-top of the front and back of the card.



Extreme Cards and Papercrafting: pop up cards, movable and mechanical cards, digital crafts and unusual papercrafts.