Busted!!!!

Good morning and Happy Friday! It's me, Cheryl from Cheryl's Window, again and I'm making another Guest Designer appearance here on She's A Sassy Lady today and am excited to share my layout with you.  It's a simple layout when you first look at it, but it has some intricacies which our new Gypsy update made possible!  I have loved my Gypsy, but now you might say "I'm in love" with my Gypsy lady!   I'm so happy with the possibilities now, that I can't imagine how they plan to make it much better, though I won't be surprised when they do!

This year, one of my goals was to scrap the everyday stuff; not just the events or the happy times.  Well, my dear daughter got her first speeding ticket.   It certainly is not something we want to celebrate, but was definitely a learning lesson for her.  It's going to take a whole biweekly paycheck of hers to pay for her ticket and she now has to add driving school to her schedule.  She was also grateful that she came home and told us about it, because I received a notice from the Police Department a few days after the citation.   She would have been in SO much trouble had she not told me about it.   Of course I wasn't there to get the picture either, so I improvised and made her go outside and park on the side of the street while I tried to get the angle right and take a picture of her reflection in her sideview mirror.  I thought this picture did well to add to our story. 

I created a basic sketch of my layout on the first page and named that tab DesignTemplate.  You can now name your tabs on the Gypsy by holding your stylus on the tab until a small pop-up window appears giving you the option to RENAME or DELETE the tab.    I was able to place most my elements on this tab and then copy them to various other tabs and then divide them by color.  I personally found it easier to divide it by design element originally to make sure I had each layer needed since this was a heavily layered project and then copy and divide by color and renamed the tabs to the color I wanted to print.  You can see the different tabs and their labels on one of my screen shots. 

I wanted to keep the colors very 'comic' book stylized so I kept to black and white for the most part.  I added the red for a pop of color and the overall colors worked well with the subject matter too, don't you think?  

As for design, I was able to personalize my images by using the HIDE CONTOUR feature on my Gypsy.  One example is the Speed Limit sign.  The sign originally says SPEED LIMIT 50.  Well, dearest Sage was busted in a 45 zone.   By hiding the 50 and replacing it with 45 from Sans Serif (any san serif font should do), I was able to personalize our sign.  I also used the Disney Cars cartridge and was able to personalize these images too.  I flipped the Sheriff's car to be facing the same direction as her car and used HIDE CONTOUR again to remove the little car's smile.   I added a frown with a parenthesis from Gypsy Font. 

Once I had all my pieces sized and organized by color in my Gypsy, I was able to start drawing, cutting, and assemblying.  Yes, I used markers and drew the road on my background cardstock.  It provided such a great effect.  Let me show you how I used my markers.

I chose the road track piece from the Cars cartridge and copied and then rotated each piece to create the road strip as desired.   I welded all pieces together and made sure they were lined up smoothly.  I then grouped all pieces together to create one group so that I could copy my entire roadway to a separate tab.  I loaded my white background cardstock and my black Cricut Marker.  One tip I picked up quite a while back (I am so sorry I cannot remember or find where I got it from) is to put a piece of tape on the marker so that you know which one you've already started using.  See pic below and you can barely see it at the top of the marker.  

I'm sure you've seen the tip to put a post-it note under your blade carriage before installing your markers.  I have accidentally marked paper and my Cricut by forgetting this, but now I keep a post-it note on the inside lid of my Cricut and replace as needed.  After installing marker, change your pressure to 2, load your paper and choose cut, and then watch it draw rather than cut.

Here is the road all drawn out. 

Next, I cut out all the remaining elements by color and started assembling the pieces.  I'll warn you now, many of these pieces were REALLY little.  Some of the really small gray pieces were too small to cut well or glue down, so I improvised with a metallic silver pen and I liked the way that came out even better. This was for the little car striping and fog lights mostly.  All other pieces and colors cut very well.  I think my gray paper was just too 'soft'.  I find that some Bazzill cardstock has too loose of fibers to cut intricate cuts.

I added a few dimensional squares to pop cars off the road just a bit.   I have wanted to use these images on a layout for a while and love how cute they came out.  The layers really make a big difference and truly bring these character images to life.  They do take a little time to assemble, but are stinkin' cute!!!   I also adhered only the sides and bottom of the photo mat to the paper so that I could slide the citation behind it.

After putting it all together, I journaled around the edges with short phrases of lessons Sage says she learned and thoughts she had while getting her citation. 

So, here is a little bit of  real life happening and lessons learned.   Again, it wasn't a great event or a celebration, but I hope it's something Sage doesn't forget and now I've been able to capture that for her to share with her future teen driver(s)! 

I hope you enjoyed this little post and found a bit of inspiration or a good tip.  If you'd like the file, please visit my blog.  You can scroll down to this part of the same post for a link to download the gypsy file. 

Thanks for stopping by.

Cartridges Used on this project:

Street Sign for Title

Disney Cars

Sans Serif - 45

Gypsy Font - (