I have a Silhouette Cameo digital cutting machine. They make it VERY easy to buy things from them. Luckily, they also have a very large selection and variety 🙂
They’re starting to carry “digital stamps with coordinating digital dies.”
Years ago, when I started stamping, we bought a stamp. We did cool things with it, but if we wanted to cut it out, we used scissors and sometimes an exacto knife.
Then die cutting machines started becoming popular. But they were big and heavy and expensive. So were the dies. And we had to find somewhere to store all those things. We gave up valuable paper storage space for those suckers. But, we wanted those letters and simple dies cut out, and idn’t want to spend all of our time cutting them. As die cutting machines shrunk, so did their price, which probably helped boost their popularity. And then, holy cow, someone had the brilliant idea to introduce embossing folders! I love these things. And now we have physical stamps we can buy and store and coordinating dies we can buy to cut the images out for us. Hallelujah! No more scissor hand cramps!
But the digital world was taking off and getting more affordable, too. Years ago I bought something called a Wishblade, by Xyron. It was one of the precursors to the Silhouette family of digital cutters, but was more than twice the price of today’s machines. I have to say, that machine was pretty cool, but my Cameo is so much better! With these machines we have the ability to create our own shapes. Use an unlimited amount of fonts for whatever we need. We can make 3D things, cards, scrapbook pages, and probably more that I can’t think of right now. We can completely design a card, from bottom to top on the computer, print it out then cut out what we need and assemble it, like I did today.
So it’s not a surprise that digital stamps are now coming with digital dies.
You may be wondering what the big deal is. Can’t you just make your own outline around the image? Yes, you can 🙂 And I do – a lot. But what I’ve found is neat about these so far (and I haven’t tried many yet) is that the image has already been made user friendly for digital stampers.
Here’s what I mean by that.
Most images made for use with digital cutters are meant to be cut out on paper, so they’re not filled with any color – they’re just lines, they’re completely transparent.
In the card above, if the cute little treat girl had been transparent, one, she would have been a little difficult to cut out because of all the tiny pieces. Two, I would need to somehow fill her in so she wasn’t see through and probably adjust the line weight. Sometimes that’s easy and sometimes that’s not. It depends on the image. Then I could create an outline around her with no problem.
Creating and marketing them as digital stamps means a lot of that work is already done for you, so you don’t have to spend precious crafting time prepping an image to do your bidding 😉 That being said, I think I would like a smaller white border around her. I can totally do that. I already have. That’s what’s so wonderful about working digitally. It’s SO flexible.
The card above was created using a pattern (the background paper) and a digi stamp and die set from the Silhouette store. I printed everything separately, colored it then let my Cameo do what it does best, and cut out those images for me. Easy, peasy, lemon squeezy.
Thanks for stopping by
xoxoxo
ajdurrant 