Easy DIY Pop-Up Bouquet: Free Cricut Templates & Tutorial

John and I are in a community group delivering Valentines to retirement homes this weekend, so I've been looking for cute-but-easy pop-up cards we could make on our Cricut.

I thought this would be an easy find, but WOW was it not. o.0 Nearly all the cards I found were either too complicated to make in multiples, had their "free" templates locked behind membership paywalls, or were on blogs so old that the template files were missing. So after a frustrating hour, I asked John to help me make our own templates.

Aaaaand here's what we came up with:

Cute, right? I like how the flowers grow as you open the card.

 I also like that the design is all-occasion friendly, because I will for sure be making more of these throughout the year.

To give proper credit where it's due: I believe the flower pop-up part originated on this Instructable - but it's so old all the graphics and video are gone. It's by far the most common design I found on Pinterest and Youtube, though:

From what I've seen all of these versions are hand cut and use a single layer of paper for the flowers. We changed ours up by adding a second layer for the flower stamens, designing templates we can cut on our Cricut, and by making the card itself as a print file.

With the machine doing all the cutting - and no need to hand draw the flower centers OR the outside card - these come together pretty fast! We've been able to whip up over a dozen in a single evening.

Ready to see how? Then here, watch me put one together in under 4 minutes:



And of course you get all our templates for free. Get ready to clicky-click!

The Cricut cut file:


Click to embiggen, then right-click and save to your desktop.

And for those of you who don't have a Cricut, we've got you covered, too:



Print this right onto your colored paper, then cut by hand. Just remember, you want colorful paper for this part, not card stock.

And here are the print files:

I also asked John to make a couple more option for the front, since I know "You Are Loved" sounds a little impersonal. (We're giving ours to strangers, that's why.)

Print this on white or light colored card stock, both front and back, and you'll get two cards per sheet.

Also let me save you some time: both JoAnn's and Michael's don't carry colorful paper. All they have is kids' construction paper and card stock. (I know, I couldn't believe it either!)  So we trekked over to Staples and got this AstroBrites pack, which comes with 150 sheets in 25 different colors:

This cost us $15 at Staples, but you can get the same pack on Amazon for $7. So... yeah, do that instead. :D

Picking your flower colors is the fun part: you can choose all one color with a contrasting center:

Which looks like this:

Or mix two colors together:

Or, if you're feeling ambitious, go for THREE colors:

I even did a few with four colors. Have fun! Mix and match!

If you make a lot of cards at a time you'll get the added bonus of a colorful art installation on your work table:

::hand flourish:: ART.

You can see ours had Suki extremely mildly interested:

That's the face of a cat debating if it's worth scooching forward a few inches.

"Ehhhhh... nah, I'm good."

(It's not so much that our cats are well behaved as they're just so comfortable.)

I hope you'll remember this the next time you feel like paper crafting! Be sure to save those templates up there for the next time you need a cute card - or be like us, and whip up a few now to give out as Valentines this weekend.