Birthday card

I needed to make a quick birthday card for a little girl.  I learned how to make a "shaped edge" card using  my gypsy from a nice video by Sheila's "Shes a SassyLady"blog a while ago.  This shows how I put the images on the virtual mat.  The left hand dark arrow on the screen points the direction the mat goes into the machine.  Yes, I've goofed & put the wrong end in before.  The mat can go in the machine from either end, but if you have a plan & put it in backwards its an oopsie moment.

This shows how I put the paper on the mat so I don't have to cut it out 4 different times.  This is a great way to use scraps or smaller pieces of paper.  There is one blue piece I didn't even bother to cut off to fit the mat. As long as paper hangs off the end & not the sides of the mat its no big deal.  I learned to plan out my mat from the Cricut messageboards.

This is how it looks after its cut out & the extra paper is peeled away.  The spatula tool is helpful to get them off the sticky cutting mat.  I cut out the lilac base already, you can see partial little girl silhouette on the left edge.

Here is the finished card with the layers glued together using a zig glue pen.  The little girl & cat is from "Meow Lite" cartridge, the candle is from "Wild Card" cartridge, the cupcake is from "Gypsy Wanderings" a preloaded cartridge in the Gypsy, and Happy Birthday is from "Paper Pups" cartridge.  The gypsy definitely makes it easier to fully access the images on the cartridges I own.

This is some scrap hologram type paper from a wrecked gift bag.  It has some sort of plastic coating, so I used a sharpie to colour it.  I noticed that if I keep colouring it in, the colour gets darker with each layer, a sweet lil discovery I think :)  The 4 square scrap shows the colour progression; the top one is not coloured, then one coating, two coatings, and three coatings at the bottom square. 

Here is the inside, again with the sparkle.  I know she liked it