Beth's Digital Cuts!: Use your stash challenge and new MDS2 feature

One of the challenges this week at splitcoaststampers was a "Use your stash" challenge. This challenge was to use that digital kit that you just had to buy, but then never used. I think the biggest challenge for me was choosing which one :) I am a bit of a download junkie. I do love digital kits. I love how the papers and stamps and embellishments all co-ordinate to make a perfect project. I finally settled on the Playful Polka dots kit. This is such a fun kit. It comes with lots of embellishments in fun bright colors. I thought it was a perfect kit for my Grandmother's Birthday pictures. A few weeks ago I featured a page from her 91st birthday, and here she is at 94. Just about everything on this page is from the kit. I added punch numbers from "timeless type" and filled them with papers from the kit. I also added some rose red buttons and a bakers twine bow. I used one of the new features of MDS2 to add the bow. The embellishment crop feature is a really nice addition to mds. On this page I didn't want the bows tails to be so long, and they are quite long in digital form I think. In the past I would resize the bow to make it shorter, but this would also make the whole bow smaller, not just the tails. With the new crop feature you can cut an embellishment any way you like. Just highlight the embellishment, and click the crop button. You will then get a worksheet looking page with your embellishment on it. You then drag a crop box over the image in the area you want to use, and the crop feature will get rid of any parts you did not highlight. Hopefully the picture below will help this make sense. Once the kids are back in school I hope to teach myself how to make a screen capture video to show you this step by step.

While I was at it, I thought I would make a matching Happy Birthday card. I'm not sure who for, but you can always use some extra Birthday cards. The way I like to make card in My Digital Studio is to make a card front. I open an 8 1/2 by 11 project page, and create a card front by adding a punch, resized to the size I want my card, minus 1/4 inch all around. In this case I took a half an inch off all around, so my punch was sized to 5 by 3 3/4 inches. Once I print out my card front, I will mount it onto a piece of matching card stock. In this case, Rose Red. I create my card front in the punch area, building up my layers. I try to think of what i want to add as a "Real" layer as I'm creating my digital card. I like to have something real on my digital cards, I want them to have some actual dimension. In this case, I pictured a button at the side of my Happy Birthday pennant. Once I have my card front done, I sometimes group all the elements together and then copy and paste three more on my 8 1/2 by 11 paper, so I end up with four all the same. I didn't do that this time for some reason. Here is what my page looked like.