My Digital Studio is awesome!

I haven't done much to promote the new digital scrapbooking software from Stampin' Up!... because I hadn't even loaded it on my comptuer yet!  I don't know what made me nervous, but I've never done any digital scrapbooking and I guess I was worried it would be hard.  Well, guess what.  It's not!  It's so easy!

Steve's cousin is getting married and I offered to do the invites for her bridal shower.  My mother-in-law wanted to mail them like postcards and we needed to get them done pretty quickly.  I gulped, took a deep breath, and decided to make them using My Digital Studio.  I bought the software clear back in November and it's been sitting in my desk drawer.  I loaded it on my desk top, which was very easy.  Then I started playing.  First I opened up an existing card template, using the Summer Home scrapbooking kit.  I moved around the flowers and added some more text boxes.  I even figured out how to add more embellishments, so I added ribbon, buttons, and some other flowers.  Even though I had never used the software before, and was teaching myself as I created, I made this invitation in less than half an hour:

Then my mother-in-law talked to Meagan and found out that her wedding colors are going to be aqua and yellow.  So we decided to tweak the shower invites to match.  I figured I could just swap the red elements for yellow.  It wasn't quite that easy, since the scrapbooking kit doesn't have yellow in it.  But I just deleted the red flowers and then used digital punches and stamps to make the yellow ones.  I can't tell you enough- it was SO EASY!  I changed the colors in about ten minutes and  came up with this:

I am hooked!  The card front size was 4 1/4 by 5 1/2 (standard quarter-sheet card size) but we wanted to print them as 4x6 photos.  My Digital Studio (MDS) has an export funtion that is so easy.  I exported the card as a JPG (basically turned it into a picture).  Then I just opened up my Windows Photo Gallery that I use to make basic corrections on my pictures and I cropped the card to 4x6.  I ordered the pictures as basic 4x6 prints through the Sam's Club website.  For 1 hour processing they were .13 each.  Thirteen cents!  It cost us less than $4 for 25 invitations, including tax!

I'm still learning how to use the software, but I am sold.  It's fantastic.  And I am not a digital scrapbooker.  I promise you, it really is easy.  You can expect to see more digital projects on my blog because I love it.  The software is $79.95 and comes with tons of digital papers, stamps, punches, etc.  Stampin' Up! is constantly offering new downloads so you can update your software, and they are very inexpensive.

Visit my website at http://www.stampinup.net/esuite/home/stephaniegittins/ and click on "Shop Now" in the top right corner to check out all the digital options.

Note:  for those of you who already have a program for digital scrapbooking, you can use the downloads with other programs, like PhotoShop.  So you can download the buttons, ribbon, stamp sets, etc without having to buy the MDS software.