Creating a Silhouette graphic on the Cricut

There are tons of posts on message boards lately about how the Silhouette Cameo is so much better than the Cricut. Having seen a close up comparisson of finely detailed cuts, yeah it cuts better. And with Cricut seeming to be concentrating on Craft Room instead of cartridges, I decided to check out the Silhouette store. Plenty there to drool over, and plenty I want, but...I still like my Cricut and I have way too much $$$ invested to run out and get a new machine. I went back through my list of "ooh, I would love to have those" graphics and realized that most of them were phrases or were word based things, so I decided to see if I could come up with similar things using my Gypsy and plethora of cartridges. First up:

I totally love this! It's simple and colorful, and something I would actually use. And honestly, I needed to use it for a page anyway, since this is the song that Jacob makes me sing to him most often. So this is what I came up with as my first attempt:
I think it turned out pretty well! There is a definite learning curve for me to figure out welding, placement on the mat, spatial relationship, etc., but it'll get there. It took a few tries to get sizing right; for me "1 inch" doesn't mean anything until I've cut it out and laid it on a page to judge. The "you are my" and "sunshine" in my graphic are different sizes in my final page rather than the same width as in the original, mostly because I wanted it to span the entire top of my 8.5x11 inch page. It could certainly be condensed for a card or a smaller page. I wanted a more playful sun that what they used, but that's a personal issue. The other thing I learned? Write down what cartridges you used because even if you think you'll remember, you probably wont'. This is Going Places (cloud), Doodlecharms (sun), Nate's ABCs (you are my) and Cursive 101 (sunshine)

365 Layouts total: 122 layouts and 5 mini albums