Stampin' Up! and My Digital Studio

Many of you have heard the sad news that Stampin' Up! has decided to discontinue to carry it's digital line called My Digital Studio.  The sales were not there and they have decided to stick with their paper products and so as of May 31st the MDS line and all the digital content will no longer be available.  As you can imagine I was super sad to hear this news. I waited a few days to post here because I wanted to do some research and see what I could do to continue to use my favorite Stampin' Up! product.  It's sort of amazing for me to say that, because I resisted digital scrapbooking for so long, but I really do love it and I love my pages and the fact that they get completed and printed out and put into books. When I made paper pages I would have to get out a lot of stuff and make a big space and sort photos and print photos and if I didn't have a big chunk of time to do it, I didn't even try.  With digital, I could open my laptop, create for a while, save it and close it to work on later. Easy peasy.  But anyway, there is not really any thing I can do to change the minds at SU and I do in fact want SU to stay around and if they feel this is a good business decision then that is what they need to do.  I still love my paper and stamps too!

I am going to still keep using MDS as it is.  Just because Stampin' Up! is getting rid of this line does not mean that I have to stop using it.  That said, there are a few things I and you, need to do.  You need to back up your purchased downloads.  Stampin' Up! has been saving your purchased downloads in a library for you in case you needed to reload them, but that will be deleted after May 31st.  You can back up to the "Cloud" or to an external hard drive or both (I am doing both).   There is a Discussion about this here.

Story Rock is the creator of My Digital Studio and they make the software for other companies as well.  They are being very helpful and have given us some great responses to questions when some demonstrators have contacted them.  They say that their My Memories software is extremely similar to the My Digital Studio program and they are offering a free trial and a free version 5 for those of you who may want to switch over to them.  They are also offering 50% off their version 6 (normally $40).  They are known to be very helpful with the tech side of things.  They also seemed to have a good response time.  There software comes with a lot of digital content and they have a ton of downloads for sale so you can keep on creating.  And they give a tutorial on how to import your Stampin ' Up! downloads into their software so you can use them too.

Here is the My Memories site info.  They posted this online for Stampin' Up! customers...

 I will let you know what else I learn going forward.
Oh, and because I love to make my digital pages and I knew that Stampin' Up! was not going to be releasing any more downloads I went on a mission to find downloads that appeal to me.  Everyone has different opinions and tastes and unfortunately mine matched up with Stampin' Up's so nicely that I was worried that I would have a hard time finding downloads.  At first all that I found were very frilly, which is pretty and has it's place, but it is not me. I am not at all frilly :)  not sure where my daughter Jillian gets it.  Another demonstrator clued me into this list of digital designers and I went through them and found a few I really like.
I found some fun stuff here at "the digital press"
and here there is a list of designers on the left and you can see who fits your style "the lily pad"
From there I found "pink reptile" and I really like all the doodle images and the papers.

Well, that's it for now.  I will keep you undated.  in the mean time happy scrapping!