A quiet two hours in Hanoi: what a pop-up card workshop involves

Most things you do in Hanoi are done at speed. You cross the road at speed, you eat at speed on a plastic stool, you get moved through a temple at speed by a guide who has four more stops. A card-making session is the opposite of that, which is most of the point.

What you actually do

You sit down at a bench with paper, a blade, a bone folder and a cutting mat, and one of our paper artists sits with you.

You pick a mechanism from the ones we have ready that day. A tree, a bouquet, a small house, an animal. Then you score, you cut, you fold, and somewhere in the second hour the flat sheet in front of you stops being paper and starts standing up on its own. People make a noise when that happens. Everyone makes the same noise.

You write in it, put it in its envelope, and take it home. If you want to post it from Hanoi, we will tell you where the post office is.

Who it suits

People travelling as a couple. It is one of the few activities where you are making something together rather than photographing something together.

Families. Children from about eight manage the cutting with help. Younger ones work from a pre-cut kit and do the folding and the gluing, which is the good part anyway.

Anyone with a wet afternoon. Hanoi rain arrives without discussion and lasts longer than your patience for a museum. This is an indoor two hours that does not feel like waiting.

Company groups and school trips. We have run it for larger groups and it works, in English or Vietnamese, up to about forty people.

What you do not need

No craft experience. No supplies, no drawing ability, no steady hands. The mechanisms are engineered so that reasonable care produces a good result; the design has already absorbed the difficulty.

What you take away

The card, its envelope, and the offcut sheets if you want to keep practising. And a fairly specific piece of knowledge: how a pop-up actually works, which you cannot get by looking at one.

Visitors tell us afterwards that it was the thing they did not plan. The itinerary had the lake, the Old Quarter, the water puppets. Nobody puts a two-hour paper workshop on an itinerary. It ends up in the photographs anyway.

Where and when

Sessions run on request while we fit out a permanent studio space, which means we set the time with you rather than the other way round. Tell us the dates you are in the city, how many of you there are, and whether you would rather come to the workshop or have us come to your hotel.

Send us your dates and we will come back with what we can run and what it costs per person.