Pop-up Card : Building in Shimane Prefecture

2022-02-04

I have continued to make pop-up cards of building in Shimane Prefecture.

In Tsuwano Town, there is a building called former the Fuse Clock and Watch Store, which was built in 1934. It was registered as a Tangible Cultural Property in September 2010. In recent years, the building was used as the Tsuwano branch office of the San-in Chuo Shimpo, but in August 2021, the branch office moved to another location. The building seems to have been vacant since then, but I have not confirmed its current status.

I had to recreate the card twice, and this photo is the latest card.

At first I glanced at the photo of the building, I thought the card would look like this. The entrance to the building is set back and has a show window, so I thought I would use a separate part for that.
But the top of the building is a monotonous shape, so I didn’t even feel like actively trying to make it.

However, when I looked at more photos, I found that the building had a gabled tile roof, not a flat roof, and the walls were built like a signboard building. The rain gutters sticking out from the middle of the wall were also because of the roof’s shape.

I heard that the circular window at the top was not a window, but for a clock.
I decided to make a card, as the shape was going to be more complicated than I had first imagined.

I thought it was cool that the window on the second floor was slightly recessed from the wall. So I planed to make the second floor window frame and the first floor show window as the main body of the card, and put another part of the wall in front of it.

All the parts have been cut out.

The front door is farther back than the show window, so I made that as a separate part.
The front door was glued first.

After that, the wall parts were glued on, and it was done.

I won’t post a picture of the first card I made, but the basic structure is almost the same. I felt it lacked depth, so I decided to rebuild it. If I only made the depth longer, it would stick out when the card was folded, so I shrunk the whole thing a bit then fixed the imbalance.

Also, the circular window at the top was inconspicuous, so I cut out the roof and changed it so that you can see the colored construction paper behind the window.

This is the second work. I was satisfied with the way the circular window looked from the front, so I posted it on Twitter and Instagram. However, when I looked at the card from above afterwards, I gradually couldn’t stand the fact that there was a big hole in the roof.