My Girl Valentine

I am so excited and so proud to share this with you.   I adore this card. I was so excited by it that I actually got teary-eyed putting it together because I think it is so sweet.     I wanted to make my dear daughter a Valentine’s Day card.   My ‘little girl’ is growing up quickly, and as much as she acts like she doesn’t want to hear it, I still tell her that she will always be “Mommy’s Little Girl” or “Mama’s Baby Girl”.  So, I saw this cute mirror in Forever Young and started thinking of all the times Sage played dress-up.

I did use many cartridges for this and I’m sure you could adapt some of the basic shapes and fonts to work with carts you have.  Sometimes I just get looking for the right shape and add from anywhere.  That is one great benefit of my Gypsy.   For this design, I used A Child’s Year, Forever Young, George, Gypsy Font, and Plantin Schoolbook.   Example:  The one rectangle mat was George, you could find a square or rectangle from anywhere and the oval rug came from Gypsy Font for some reason.  If you convert this to a .cut file, you could substitute a different oval with no problem. 

Now, I’ll give you a few other details.   I created the shadow of the girl, mirror, rug, and hat.  I then used the silhouette for the little girl with the mirror and hat and a smaller version of the oval.   I did fiddle with the shadows to be more what I liked.  For example, I made the shadow for the mirror a little less wide than the original.  I also slightly slanted (using the italisize button) the mirror and its shadow.

For the silhoutte, I also added the mirror oval and DID NOT weld this so that it would cut the inside of the mirror out.   The first time I cut this file and didn’t cut that out, I layered it all and then realized that by layering the reflected girl and the oval onto the mirror, this gave it a different illusion of being in the foreground rather than background.   However, I did not bother to cut the reflected girl out of the mirror.  When setting up my images, I duplicated the little girl and then made the copy slightly smaller to imitate a reflection.  After cutting my images, I positioned the reflected girl where I wanted her on the oval mirror piece and flipped them over to trace the oval and cut out her edge.   Since I was dealing with silhouttes, I didn’t need to worry about flipping any images because you can’t tell front from back once her bow is cut off.   🙂

The font was difficult to cut and remove, but I was able to achieve it.   I am finding great success with setting my blade to 6, my pressure to 3, and mutlicut to 2 for most of my cuts using my G.  I do prefer a quality cardstock and patterned paper with a heavier weight equivalent to most cardstocks.   PP used here was Little Yellow Bicycle and cardstock was Core’dinations.  The black cardstock was a smooth stiff black, not sure where that came from.  

The inside was using same papers as above.   I created the sentiment in Word and printed it directly onto the PP.  

Now, if you would like the gypsy file, please click HERE.  My files are free to share, but I ask that you do not change or edit the name if you use it and please give me credit for it.  If you want to share it with others, please send them to this post so that I can see when it is downloaded.   Also, please leave me a comment if you download this file and I would love to see what you create with it. 

I do hope you like my card.  I can’t wait to give it to her.  Thanks for stopping by today.
Cher~