Stampin' Addicts MDS2 Blog Hop

You may have heard, Stampin' Up is celebrating National Digital Scrapbooking Day all week with FREE digital downloads, 50% off all digital kits, designing contest, and more!  What a great opportunity to highlight some fabulous features of MDS2!

So, welcome to the Stampin' Addicts MDS2 Blog Hop! If you have been interested in learning more about digital scrapbooking and designing, this is the place to be!  You may have just come from Paula's blog featuring custom-sized projects.  Weren't her custom projects awesome?  Today I'm going to share some projects that involve converting templates or existing projects into new, different-sized projects.

There are so many adorable card templates in these kits, and I've wanted to use them to create a scrapbook page.  With the original MDS program, we would have had to either go through some complicated steps to convert the template to a different size or recreate the whole design.  But with MDS2, we can import a template into a different-sized project easily.  Here is the original card template I started with.

With your new (scrapbook) project open, use the path insert > add other template pages > choose the template and follow the wizard to insert your page.  MDS2 resizes the template for you.

A little bit of nudging of existing elements, adding some photo boxes, splashes from French Foliage stamp set, and baker's twine, and there you go.  An easy way to get a start on a scrapbook page!  Notice the baker's twine bow; I used the MDS2 feature of cropping embellishments.  This page uses the Autumn Spice digital kit, which includes French Foliage, and is one of the kits on sale.

I feel like this next project was cheating, because it was just too easy!  I copied the cover of March's Stampin' Success magazine a while back as a backdrop for my monthly newsletter, using the kit New Heights (also on sale).  I thought it would look great converted from 8-1/2 x 11" page into a greeting card.

There is a training video on mydigitalstudio.net called Project Size Conversion that shows how to do this, but in a nutshell, while your original project is open, click edit > change project size/type from the top tool bar.  The program will step you through creating a new file and build the pages for you!  The sentiment is from the set Loving Thoughts.

My next project illustrates some other fun and helpful features of MDS2.  I fell in love with the Christmas Village stamp brush set when Stampin' Up released it last year, but I was a little bummed that is was so difficult to color the buildings in MDS.  MDS2 to the rescue!  With a combination of stamp image coloring (color stamp image more than one color) and the freeform brush tool (allows you to freeform color a box with different colors which will sit as a layer beneath the stamp image), I was able to color a whole village scene.

Wouldn't this be a perfect holiday card?  In addition to the Christmas Village stamp brush set, I used embellishments from Home for the Holidays ensemble.

Finally, I had wanted to create a 3-D project with one of the free downloads Stampin' Up is offering this week.  This one uses the Days in December kit, along with the hostess disc Eventful Year.  

I combined the candy wrapper template from Eventful Year with the advent calendar template from Days in December to create little miniature Countdown to Christmas candy wrappers.  I had another idea for these candies; come back next week to check it out!

Would you like to learn more?  Mydigitalstudio.net has information on the MDS2 software, including what content comes with the program, and a 30-day FREE trial.  The website also has extensive training videos with all the wonderful features of the software.  I encourage you to take some time to play with this fun program!

If you aren't yet a member of Stampin' Addicts, you can sign up here. Make sure you check out the next stop to see what Tanya put together using the calendar effects. She has some great ideas!
 

 

The complete blog hop listing:

1) Yapha -- Design in Spreads
2) Paula (scrapshappen) -- Custom Sizes
3) Heidi (hlw966) -- Project Size Conversion with Importing Templates of Other Sizes
4) Tanya (Tanya27) -- Calendar Effects
5) Adriana (escape2stamp) -- Mirror Text

Thanks for stopping by!