Cottage Chic Mini Journal

Digital files are all the rage these days in the scrapbook/crafting world.  I made a journal from pages that I printed from a digital file.  Marion Smith has some of the most beautiful digital journal files I have ever seen.  She had a challenge for her Cottage Chic Mini Book this last month.  I submitted my journal that I made with her designs and I did so via YouTube and I want to share my experience with this project. 

To be honest I have always been skeptical of digital files.  I have printed some freebies out that have not been very "clean" digitally and I have an inkjet printer.  So when thinking about printing out 12+ pages of digital imagery, you want everything perfect so you're not printing over and over to get a "good" print.  Well, Prima has freebies on their facebook page every week.  Marion had a file for her new Romance Novel paper line with Prima, so I decided to print it out.  I was so impressed with the file that I knew I had to get the Cottage Chic Mini Book even with my inkjet printer.

I cannot say enough good things about Marion's digital files.  Every one is beautiful, digitally clean and easy to print.  The best part is you can print as many copies as you want.  Say you have 10 friends that you want to make journals for as gifts, you can print 10 copies.  There is not a limit on how many you can print.  When you purchase the paper pads at the store, you only get (at the most) 3 sheets of each print.  So you would need 4 paper pads! Ouch! Now you say what about the card and ink that you use with your printer?  So much cheaper than the paper pads.  I just purchased index card weight cardstock, 250 count, for less than $8.  Printer ink is expensive, but I printed my whole Cottage Chic Mini on the color ink cartridge low ink warning and I am still printing in color. 

To sum up my experience, I love Marion's digital designs.  I would recommend these to anyone looking for quality digital designs.

In the journal I did a lot of stamping.  I painted this dress form with black acrylic, Martha Stewart black glitter, and Liquid pearls.  The dress form is a two piece form from Mini Album Scraps ning site.  I then made a number of different pockets to handle all of the tags from Marion and multiple freebie websites.  The two butterfly tags are stamped images that I stamped in Stazon Black and then colored with colored pencils. 

I have attached my video below.  I go through the mini pretty quickly, so if you have any questions, please leave me a comment.  Hope you enjoy and go check out Marion Smith Designs.

 Enjoy life!