Zip Files

Hopefully on Saturday you picked up that free kit from DST. (If not, it's still available. I checked!) It is a collab kit from the designers at Scrap Matters, which means that they all made up some parts to make up the whole kit. Collabs (short for collaborations) are a great way to see how you like a lot of designers for a low price.

The link I sent you to had you download the DST Insider (which is a free monthly magazine they put out), and a Coupon Catalog for the iNSD sales. Neither of those are the free kit though! Did you check out the download files within the PDFs? There were 6 downloads in each, for a total of 12.

Parts 1-6: DST Insider Page 31
Parts 7-12: iNSD Coupon Catalog Page 6

The easiest way to download your files is to create a Scrapbooking folder somewhere on your computer (I put mine on my desktop), and then to have sub-folders for stores/designers. Downloading it in an organized manner makes it a lot easier to find what you want later, and it's a lot easier to credit the supplies you use (which is required if you want to post your pages online). I saved all of my files in my DST folder (although since it's a Scrap Matters Collab it would fit there as well).

Understanding how to use Zipped Files:

A Zipped file (also known as a compressed file) will have an icon like this:

Compressed files are used to package up files in a way that they are smaller and easier to download.  However, using your digital files when they are within a compressed folder isn't very nice, so luckily Windows has a built-in unzip tool.  Simply right click on your zip file and choose Extract All...

A box will pop up asking you where you want the extracted files to go.  I generally save my compressed files in the folder that I want them to go, so I simply delete the generic file name that they give me.  This time I wanted to create a new folder to keep all of the collab together, so I simply replaced the last string of the breakdown with "Lifes Little Surprises".

Once you've unzipped a couple of files and learned how they work, you will find a system that works for you.  Also, Windows helps you along by not letting you copy over files or folder, but allows you to merge them together, meaning it won't copy redundant files, but will add the new ones to the folders associated.

Once I'm done extracting all of the files, I then delete the zip files.  Zip files are more liable to corruption because of the mumbo jumbo that goes on during compression, and because scrap files are mostly pictures, they don't get very compressed anyway.

I hope this helped!  Let me know if I missed anything or if you have any questions!