And when you listen to that song, you can’t help but wonder about the imagery the lyrics conjure up. Such as the rocking horse people eating marshmallow pies. So, what do these ‘rocking horse people’ look like? I always imagined them as half-man half-wooden horse centaurs. And more precisely, half hippie, half wooden horse. Complete with bell-bottoms. Like so:

What’s that thing he is holding there, you say? No way that’s a marshmallow pie, you say! More like a marhsmallow cake. Well, you are absolutely right. However, do you know how hard it is to make an easily foldable convincing pie? So I decided to go with a piece of cake instead…

The hippie part is probably not very authentic, when you want to get close to what the Fab Four had in mind when they made the song. After all, the album was released in 1967, when the hippie culture was still in its infancy (or so I’m told – I am not that old). Anyway, I think it matches the atmosphere and folklore of LSD (wink, wink).

You will find the template to make one yourself at the bottom of the page. When you actually build the model, you have to be careful: It’s by no means balanced in and of itself, so I highly recommend glueing a small weight (such as a coin) to the inside of the base, like so:

The other shocking truth I should mention is that this is not really a rocking horse: It doesn’t rock. The reason is that it turns out to be virtually impossible to properly balance the damn thing, at least I couldn’t muster the patience to do it. So it’s extremely prone to falling over to one or the other side. Therefore, I decided to add little flaps to the skids, in order to make it stand upright:

This means you can’t tip it to make it gently rock back and forth. If you want it to be able to do so, just cut it out without the flaps and balance it with more / better distributed weights (good luck!).

Here is the template PDF file.

Here is the template.

Here is the template.

Here is the template.

Here is the template.

Well, Y here lacks an arm and is quite small, but he makes up for it with his charms and not a small dosage of confidence. X, on the other hand, is all cool and laid back – she knows that no matter what, no human could exist without her. Something you can’t say of Y, much to his chagrine.

Anyway, the two of them make a nice team, what with Y’s drive for adventure and X’s down to earth ‘let’s get the job done’ attitude.

If you want to make them, here is the PDF template. It’s admittedly a bit finicky to assemble these. If used as provided, the figures will about be 6cm high. To make things a bit easier, you may want to scale up the PDF a bit when printing.

Looks like a regular greeting card, right? Now, when you pull the left-hand handle and rotate the image, this is what happens:

The smiley is replaced by a heart. Add some personal text and you have the nicest valentine card. Here is a video that shows the effect:

Should anybody wonder, the pixelation is deliberate – I like the old-school 8-bit look of the smiley and heart icon.

Now, how do you make one of these? Well, first of all, print and cut out the following two-page template:

• Page 1
• Page 2

You will get three smaller pieces and the card itself:

(The pencil is supposed to highlight the fact that the card itself also has an internal cut. This will be difficult to make with scissors, and I rather suggest a Xacto knife or similar tool)

Now, you have to align one of the ‘heart’ pieces with the card itself, like so:

The heart piece goes behind the smiley part, and they should be aligned so that the vertical cut ends for both at the same position. This also means their left semicircle edge will align:

Next, take the other two parts and align them in a similar way to each other:

Next, keep each of the two pairs firmly together and slight one pair into the other, so that they interlock and meet at the vertical incision:

This is a bit difficult, and you have to be sure that everything is perfectly aligned. In the end, the two top parts should form a complete smiley face:

Almost done. Now glue the bottom flap to the card. As you can see, it extends below the card, but that will be corrected by cutting the piece off where it sticks out. Glue the two left-hand flaps together, but not to the card. Make sure that the parts can rotate freely while the glue is drying. The pieces interlock and hold each other securely in place. The glue makes sure that the two rotating parts move in sync, and that they cannot move too far – otherwise, they would fall out of the card.

Here is the card after trimming the bottom flap:

All that’s left to do is to fold the card at the center line and to come up with some witty / romantic / cool text to go inside the card.

Again, kudos to Extreme Cards and Papercrafting for the idea and concept.

Here is the template.

Since this is a simple box – as are all Cubicity models – you can actually use it to stow away / carry Cubicity people. About six to eight should fit in there comfortably.

Here is the template.

The name Seppl, by the way, is a short form of ‘Josef’ – just like Joe is in English.

Here is the template.