Lil' Inker 3rd Birthday Celebration

Happy 3rd Birthday Lil' Inker!  It seems like I have been using your dies forever, it's hard to believe it's only been 3 years.  Lil' Inker is having a huge birthday celebration with lots of prizes up for grabs.  Ever since it was first announced that they would be having a big celebration about a week ago, I have been thinking and thinking about what I might like to make.  Obviously their challenge was going to be "birthday related" so I started thinking about everything I could make using Lil' Inker products that had to do with birthday.  I did google image searches of balloons, pinwheels, presents and kept coming back to the fabulous custom cake designs that people make to celebrate birthdays.  Yesterday the Lil' Inker challenge was posted and here is the challenge photo to base our project on:

Lil' Inker 3rd Birthday Challenge

What did I see that inspired me?  It would be a lot easier to say what "didn't" I see that inspired me. Front and center I saw that cute cake, the bright blue color, the big poofy bow, the patterns on the party hats and of course, those great balloons.  Now, what kind of cake do I want to make based on all this inspiration?  I remember I had seen a pinwheel cake somewhere so decided to make one myself using Lil' Inker dies.  Here is what I came up with:

I started with a stacking round box and lid cut file from the Silhouette online store.  I sized the boxes to be the exact size as two of the Lil' Inker's Stitched Mat Circles.  I wanted to add that extra nice stitching detail to all of the round portions of my box.  Here's a little closeup of that great stitching detail so well known to Lil' Inker fans.

(The largest box uses the largest stitched circle and the smaller box used the third largest circle)

Here's the finished birthday cake:

Embellishing the boxes was easy.  I used a variety of bold double-sided patterned papers (Simple Stories, Snap) and Lil' Inker Mini Pinwheel dies to cut 8 pinwheels and a My Favorite Things grass border in the same three shades of green as the cake photo.  The pinwheels are adhered to the top of the box making it easy to open for filling with some kind of birthday goody.  The small box has Lil' Inker Clouds (Rainbow & Cloud Dies) and also a couple of Lil' Inker Sun dies (large).  

I cut the #3 and added some punched polka dots to match the original photo and since balloons were the main image for their birthday celebration, I added a few Balloon Dies along with their Balloon String die too.

I had such a good time making this tiered cake and I don't know anyone other than Lil' Inker that is turning "3" anytime soon, so I doubt I will ever really use it, but it is actually quite sturdy.

Lil' Inker's birthday celebration challenge runs until August 25th...plenty of time to make something extra special to help them celebrate.  Here's a link to the challenge just in case you have missed it.  Happy Birthday Lil' Inker!

I also am going to enter this in the Seize the Birthday Anything Goes challenge.