A birthday comes around...

...but once a year. OK cheesy gag, but it was my inspiration for this card! For ages, I have struggled with cutting out circles as they have always gone wrong somewhere in the cutting process and ended up looking a bit lopsided and mis-shapen. Not any more! Was wandering round the QVC outlet shop craft section and lo-and-behold, what did I find but the We R Memory Keepers magnetic cutting mat complete with circle cutter, and a bargain at £13.15 once the discount had been deducted. I usually go there to kill some time whilst my son is in pre-school, but once I bought it I had to head home to play! It really is a fab bit of kit and is the mat designed to go with the WRMK interchangeable cutting head paper cutter ruler I bought last week, the ruler clings magnetically to the board and makes cutting fancy edges to paper soooo much easier (easier with the proper mat than stick the ruler to my regular mat with DST anyway lol)

I am very fond of Tiddly Inks digi stamps, and the one I have used here is 'Annie', a freebie image which was given to all the members of Christy's PCP page to use to create a DT entry. I tried and failed :( but really love the image and it was the first digi I actually coloured with my promarkers so I have a bit of a soft spot for it. I coloured her for this card using cocktail pink, tan and buttercup promarkers and then got a bit carried away making circles and thought hmmmm better work out what I can do with them. Annie looked rather sweet set behind a circle border of pink, so I glued and trimmed the image to the same size as the pink circle and then used a nice buttercup yellow sheet of card to make a bigger circle, and stuck it all together. It looked to be a combination between a side plate and a frisbee so I figured I had better come up with some ideas of what to do with it now!

Due to my previous lack of skill at cutting circles, I have never worked with them, so it was full-steam ahead to discover what I could do now. Determined as I was to make a circle card, I cut out two more circles to make the 'back' of the card and then punched some holes in, added some pink eyelets and went to rummage through my ribbons bag. I wanted some pink, yellow and brown to match the image and hit lucky with some pink and yellow, but had no brown. Then I spotted it, the brown twisted cord I have been hoarding in my craft drawer for ages with no particular purpose and I had the missing item I needed. Woohoo! Threaded the three ribbons through securing the front and back together and tied them into a bow, added a pink skeleton leaf and a yellow butterfly to make the card really stand out. Had a dig in my gems box and found some pretty pink and yellow gems which I stuck all round the edge to add a bit of bling. Then I stood back and thought, oh pants, it's round, it's heavier on one side than the other and it doesn't open like a conventional card. IT'S NEVER GONNA STAND UP! AAAAARRGH!

Racked brain and decided it would have to go on a plate stand or something similar, remembered I don't have any plates which need stands and went on a mission to find a plate stand I could make out of card, and to my surprise, I found one and it works.

Think I need to go and lie down now... oh but first I will have to hide the card from my kitten who was trying to help out at the ribbon tying stage and I am sure would love to get her paws on a floaty butterfly topper!

As I have used no other colour but pink, yellow and brown, I am entering this in the Crafts and Me Challenge of the same colour scheme. Tiddly Inks have an Anything Goes challenge at the moment so I have entered it there too.