Is it a boy or a girl?

So my brother and sister-in-law are expecting their third little one.  They currently have 2 boys and were hoping to complete their family with a little girl.  They decided that they wanted to do something different and mail some sort of announcement.  The conversation began when we were talking about the new craze of making pink or blue cakes that you cut into to find out the sex of the baby.  I enjoy making cakes as well as my crafting and scrapping.  But of course we could not send cakes across the country.  So, I was going to come up with a cake like type of decoration.  My mom started brain storming ideas with me and lets just say she comes up with good ideas but wow were some of them complicated!  We tried a few ideas and nothing quite looked right.  I then remembered a class that I took with Cindy Royal (Thanks Cindy!) at the Cricut Stampede.  I tried to explain it to my mother and she was really questioning it.  Then the next day I found the example I made in class and I showed her and she loved it.  So there we went and we got started.
Now the tricky part is that we were going to make 8 and many of the people knew she was going to be finding out and wanted to know right away.  So the fact that we are in Mississippi and we have a good bit of family in CA I needed to get them prepped and out as quickly as possible.  So, to make things easier I created 8 undecorated bases and 8 sets of decorations for both boy and girl.  That way once we found out I could whip them up that night (OK, it still took 6-7 hours so it still took most of that night) and then get them out in the post early the next day.  We really enjoyed how they turned out and it was a fun way to discover the news.

So just like the surprise cakes I made the outside completely neutral so that the person receiving it only discovers if it is a boy or a girl when opening up the box.

Once you pull off the lid the sides open up and there are standing items on little plastic pieces.  There is then a tea light with flowers around the flame.  This is designed to look like a mini cake so the recipients do get a cake after all!

Here I had the flash on so some of the colors are a little washed.  You can see that I have the flame turned on.

I used Storybook and Sugar and Spice for the pop ups.

Another shot of the inside and the little girl.

Here we have the baby carriage.

Thank you so much Cindy for this idea, I am so glad I took your class.  My brother and sister-in-law loved the goodies that they got to send out.  Thanks so much for your looking!

Happy crafting,

Cassie