Exploring Digi Stamps

I used to scour the Internet for free Digi Stamps all the time. Mostly I was looking for images to color in my down time. I didn’t really do anything with them more than that and after a while I sort of forgot all about them… until now.

Recently, I became a premium member of Craft World, and as a perk, you get free Digi Stamps every month. I started downloading some of them because… well, why not. But I still hadn’t done anything with them. I just wanted to be sure to get them while I still could. Then on Instagram, I saw a post for a monthly craft challenge hosted by Time for Tea – a new craft company to me. The stamped images were so cute, I had to check out their website to see what else they offer!

The challenge event was still open to entries for a chance to win a gift certificate to their store. Since they are a UK company, there’s no way to get any of their products in time for this challenge. Low and behold, Time for Tea offers FREE Digi Stamps! What a fun way to try a freebie from a new company you’re exploring. I figured I’ll use their free Digi Stamps for their monthly challenge! Who knows, maybe I’ll get randomly selected for a gift certificate to order from them! 🙂

What are Digi Stamps?

Basically, a Digi Stamp is an image file you download to your computer. Generally they are the outline of an image, just like a stamp would be. There are some really unique properties of Digi Stamps and advantages over your typical rubber or clear stamps:

• Instant gratification because you can download right away – no shipping!
• You can resize the image.
• Alter the image and/or combined it with other images or text to create a composition.
• Printing yields a perfect impression every time.
• If you have a laser printer, you can print and foil with a laminator.
• Best of all, no inky fingers!

My Challenge Entry

So I decided to enter the Time for Tea monthly challenge. Since I don’t own any of their stamps or dies (yet!), this is the card I made using their free Digi Stamps and different dies in my stash.

Ways to Use Digi Stamps

There are loads of ways to use Digi Stamps in your projects, but I’ll just name some that I’ve been exploring lately:

• Coloring – You can print and color just for fun. Or collect several images and create a coloring book as a gift.
• Full card front design – If you want to make a completely flat card, you can create your entire card front – sentiment and all. Then print it out on some cardstock and cut your card base. Be sure to position your card front design so you have room to cut the inside/back of your card as well.
• Collage – Create a collage of several Digi Stamps and/or text to make something new and original!
• Mirror – Have you ever done mirror image stamping with your clear stamps? It’s not always 100% perfect and it can be cumbersome. Lawn fawn has even come out with a line of stamps that are mirror images of their older stamps. And it’s well-worth it to have the mirror image if you do a lot of it. Well, you can pretty easily do a flip of your Digi Stamp and voila! You have an instant mirror image that’s perfect every time!
• Digitally color – Not a great colorist (like me)? You can color your images on your computer! I have photoshop, so it’s not too terribly hard to just select the blank white space and then bucket fill it. I can even do a gradient fill for some “shading”. LOL
• Die cuts – If you have something like the Scan n’ Cut or a Cricut machine, you can print & cut your images as well. If you’ve digitally colored your images, then you’ve got instant die cut embellishments you can use on your project.
• Pattern paper – You can create your own pattern paper. If you ever get a bunch of small images that you don’t know how to use or are too fiddly to fussy cut. Well, you can just copy, paste and rotate them to create your own pattern paper! Change the black lines to colored lines and print on white paper for a different look. Or why not print on colored cardstock for an instant colored pattern paper!

The possibilities are truly endless.

Things to Consider

There are probably a lot of things to consider that I haven’t yet, but here are some things I’ve learned so far:

• An SVG file is a vector graphic file. This means that you can truly scale the image up and down without adverse affects. For example, you won’t lose any quality of image – no fuzziness.
• Other filetypes (e.g. .JPG or .PNG) have a fixed resolution. If you manipulate the image beyond its limits, you may start to see some quality issues when you go to print. Generally, you will get “high resolution” images that will work just fine on the scale of a card front. But there’s going to be a limit to how much you can resize the image before it starts to get fuzzy/blurry.
• If you plan to make to sell, always check the usage policy from the company to make sure you’re in compliance.