A Cool Little Thing I Did - MTC and SVG Available

I use Stampin Up cardstock almost exclusively for my card bases. I like the weight of it and with all the colors they offer I can usually find a color to match any of the paper I am using. I also like to see the colors in Make The Cut when I am designing a card. Even if I am not cutting anything I still design in MTC so I can get the measurements right the first time and not have to guess at waste paper.

On Saturday I decided I needed an easy way to be able to reference colors without having to look up the RGB codes each time I wanted to use a color. After wondering what would be the best way I came up with this method. I made 1 inch squares in Make The Cut and then typed the names of all the current colors and all the retired colors that I have in ink or paper and then put them in the squares and did a join so the name will stay with the appropriate block. After I posted about this in the Make The Cut forum one of the members told me about a really cool gadget called COLOR COP and I did download it and I am sure I will be using it a lot in the future as well. If you decide to download make sure you look in the left hand side menu and click that download button. If you do the one on the right it is going to give you some weird program you likely don't want.

Maybe I need to explain how I use the colors a little better. I often use the MY CREATE INK website to find coordinating colors for cards and now I can get my group of colors figured out there and then open this file and slide the colors I want to use in a group to the side and copy and paste those blocks to a new project. Once that is done I can either resize my blocks how I need them if I am using a polygon shape or I can click on it and have the color menu come up, add to custom color and then go back and change the color of the image I am wanting to use. I hope that makes sense because it does in my head...but we all know my head can be a scary place sometimes.

Here is an example of a card I made this past weekend where I used the colors. If the paper is patterned then I just try to use a color that is close to one of the colors in the paper. For instance, on this card the background paper was mostly red, the long ivory strip was a white background with colored dots and the blue was mostly blue and the little flowers were stamped in blue. I know this might be a lot of work but like I said I like being able to know exactly what measurements I need to cut so I don't waste paper. The actual colors were Rose Red, Bashful Blue, So Saffron and since I didn't have Certainly Celery cardstock I used Pear Pizzazz.

I am offering the file in SVG as well because a dear friend of mine, whose name rhymes with cinnamon, wished she had it in SVG and sometimes I am nice to my dear friends who don't use MTC and convert files. Since there are so many Stampin Up users out there I thought I would take the time to convert this one.



I still have 3 more giftbags to show you guys but wanted to interrupt and share this with you first. After the giftbags I have some mini-albums I will be posting.