Imagine Help & 4th of July

So.. let me start with the most important part of this post. I got an Imagine for Mothers Day and will sometime this week finally get to open it (YAY im so excited!!). I just kind of jumped into my expression.. which worked.. but it took me forever to figure it out properly. So, I was wondering if any of you have any suggestions of blogs, or sites or anything like that where I could go to get all the info I need for starting to use the Imagine.. Im at square one.. I seriously have NO idea how to even begin to work the thing. I dont even know if I have to use a special type of paper for it lol. So any sites or blogs that have helped you out or any tips or info you can give me that helped or anything like that would be great!! thanks so much in advance for your help.

Now, onto my 4th of July. We spent it with my husbands family.. well we spent a lot of it getting ready to go lol. I for some odd reason ended up making a cake (with tons of help from my husband.. actually he did most of it lol). My pics aren't the best.. I took all of them with my iPhone since our Nikon was already packed and ready for the evening.

Adam got up at 6:30am (he couldn't sleep it wasnt like he had to or anything lol) and ended up having to go shopping to get a few things like.. oil and flour. We don't have a lot of stuff that we should have since we're still unpacking etc. He ended up baking all of the cakes and cutting them too.

How we made the flag cake:

We made 1 box of white cake (makes two 9inch circle cakes), 1 box of white cake that we dyed blue with gel food coloring (makes two 9in circle cakes, and 1 box of strawberry cake and added some red food coloring (makes two 9in circle cakes.

We cut the red and white cakes in half (to make each 1 cake into 2 cakes that could be layered.. not in half like a pie), then we stacked them (from bottom to top) white, red, white, red. With the top red & white layers we took those off the cake and stacked one blue cake with them and traced with a knife the lid of a sour cream container... then we took the middle of the blue cake and put it to the side.. and the outter circles of the white and red cake to the side.

I made a filling from cool whip and mashed up strawberried and filled between each layer.. and in the circle of the blue layer. Then we frosted the cake with cream cheese frosting that I made from my better homes cook book.. its the best frosting ever! lol.

We actually made 2 of these cakes.. one said "Happy 4th" and had fireworks and the other was covered in strawberries and blue berries. I only got a pic of this one cake because the other one was gone already and of course I didnt have my Nikon so its not the best quality of a pic.

The cake pops I made with the left over cake and left over cream cheese frosting. I just kind of eyeballed it.. no recipe or anything just added what needed to be added. I had got some of the melting candy from Michaels the day before.. one bag of white and one of red. I dipped lollipop sticks in the melted candy and then shoved them into the middle of the cake balls. Then I put them into the freezer for about 10-15 mins.. my cake balls were so heavy that it was the only way I could keep them from falling off the sticks into the candy. Pretty simple, I must add this was my very first time doing cake pops and for a first time they turned out pretty good. :)

Hope you all had an amazing 4th of July weekend!! Thanks for stoppin' by and have a great day!