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Wedding in a Barn Pop Up Card

I made this custom greeting card to match the wedding venue.  The best photo I could find of the barn was not that great, and I didn't want to ask the couple for one.

Word was the bride was planning to wear cowboy boots and a denim jacket over her dress, so I added those details to the silhouette.


origamic architecture barn pop up card


What a challenging design.  The porch roof, gah!  It took me one entire Saturday to engineer that.

As always, I struggled with what to put on the front of the card.  It's not my strong point.

bow front card



The construction of the pop up card is interesting.  The card is folded into thirds, rather than in half.  The porch is cut on the top panel.  This top panel folds down behind the middle panel (the part with the barn).  The bottom third of the card is the floor, where the "best wishes" sentiment is.


barn origamic architecture card


There is a long horizontal slit in the middle panel allowing the entire porch to slide through from the back.  The roof is doubled, with a fold line at the front edge.

With the porch in place, the pillars are then affixed through slits in the floor.

The rest is a standard origamic architecture folded design.

I am not offering this template for two reasons: mostly, because I would like it to be unique for the couple who received it, but also because the thought of cleaning up the template and writing coherent instructions makes me want to just go lie down for awhile.

Here are some illustrations, however, to give you an idea how the construction works. 

This is my initial draft from the photo I found.  First I had to draw a straight-on view from an angled photo. 


beginning to work on pop up card



Here I have done some work on the porch.  I was trying to get the placement right and working on the colors.


barn pop up wedding card template




Final pattern.  You can see I made the pillars much fatter because in my first prototype the skinny pillars crumpled when the card was closed.

barn pop up template







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