July card challenge

Once again it was my turn to set the card challenge for the Silhouette plus forum...This month it was decided between Myoriah (Beth) and myself that we would use a free file from the silhouette store and ask that the more experienced users would alter it in any way and the newbies could use it as is....this teaches a few things for all users...newbies might not know how to find the free files that are not readily advertised by silhouette but are there for our use should we want them. It also gives the more experienced amongst us to play with a shape and maybe learn new techniques which they maybe have been meaning to try but havent gotten round to doing, it also then gives insight too newbies of the possibilities of each file they have and that by having a few files if they look differently at them they can change what they have into something else the possibilities are then endless...

So the file i chose was a 3 tiered cake with candle and decoration inside the cake....lots of bits to play with...
here is the first card i made:

The 3 other cakes i downloaded from http://cajoline-scrap.blogspot.co.uk/search/label/FREEBIES in jpeg format..she has some wonderful kits that she gives freely and i have a very nice selection from her pages...I imported the jpegs into the sil software and did a print and cut and cut each cake 3 times so that i  could decoupage them. I then cut out the 3 tier cake file twice in contrasting colours and laid one ontop of the other. I cut 4 squares of card on my silhouette to make sure they were uniform and layered the decoupage on each one. A quick happy birthday was sketched with the silhouette and a very quick and easy card even for a beginner!!

My second card for the challenge :

This one was made by offsetting the cake several times and cutting the layers with white and gold card.Layering like this can be very popular and with the silhouette it is so very easy to achieve once you work out how much space you want to offset. I cut one of white card and one of gold card the same size and simply layered them to give the interest of the gold coming through the top layer, and then started the offsets. I stuck at 3 offsets as i thought this looked right for me. I used a cream card that i had in my stash and put the design onto pale pink spotted paper so that the background gave the card a soft look. Once again a very easy card for a beginner to try and they can then master the offset feature of our fabulous machines, a much underrated feature of the silhouette i think!

Finally I came up with this card:

I wanted to add a very fun card to the equation, to show that challenges dont have to be serious but can and should be fun. I had the idea of someone jumping out of a cake but didnt want the usual scantily clad woman and decided to use a man instead! As the card was being placed on a forum I didnt want to offend anyone so chose not to use nude or revealing photos (not that i have any of those HOnest!!) and thought Fogle would be funny and right. He comes from a cd called Elves with Attitude from http://www.jemsdesigns.co.uk/

The background paper was from a digi kit from craft artist and daisytrail, I thought in my wisdom he would look great with fireworks in the background and after much searching i found i had some all along. I removed the candle from the file and then cut 2 copies, one in white and one in brown card. To enhance the cake and bring it back out i stuck on some peel offs in the middle layer that ive had in my stash for years, they were tiny little stars and i never found a use for them before now!!

Thank you for looking
Love debby xx