Featured Designer – Traci Reed Designs
Happy Friday Sweet Shoppers! I hope your holiday season has been filled with lots of love, fun, family and friends, and of course a lot of photos and scrapping! My sister is visiting this week so we’ve had lots of fun visiting and getting our fill in. We only see each other about once a year due to the physical distance between our homes (Alberta and Tennessee), it’s been good for the soul!
Today we’re debuting our last Featured Designer of 2023, Traci Reed Designs! One look at Traci’s store and you’ll see her kits are completely full of everything you would ever need for both a digital scrapbooking page or a hybrid page or project. Her illustrations are so perfect for any theme you could think of. Traci’s Featured Designer kit, Hygge Winter is such a fun take on Winter and the spirit of Hygge, which is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a cozy quality that makes a person feel content and comfortable.” You can get this kit FREE with any $10 purchase from today until the new releases go live on January 12th.
And now to learn more about Traci.
Tell us about your journey with digital scrapbooking… How did you find out about it? Did you start with paper first? How did you get started designing? Where was your first shop? How and when did you end up at Sweet Shoppe Designs?
Oh gosh, I feel like I’ve told this story a thousand times over the years, but in case you missed it the first thousand times….
I started digital scrapbooking AND designing at the exact same time at the end of 2004 when I found myself 19 with a 6 month old. I had always been a scrapbooker and so it seemed obvious that I would keep scrapbooking now that I had a child, but I was flat broke (as one normally is as a teen parent) and had to find a way to support myself AND my hobby.
Luckily, I was getting in on the ground food of the industry and there weren’t a lot of options or good products available yet, so my (now pathetic-looking) attempts at early design were well received and it wasn’t long before I was making decent money and could help support us.
I started my own site for a while and bounced around to a couple stores before I joined SSD in 2008 after a designer call and never looked back. SSD and Robin are my home and family and I’ll never sell in another store.
How do you define your style? What does that style include? How has your style changed over the years?
I think my style has evolved over the years of working for paper companies into a more traditional scrapbooking style. I adore the digital kits crammed with uber-realistic goodies, but since I’m more of an illustrator and pattern designer nowadays, my work tends to focus more on how to make those illustrations and patterns shine! Since I also want to make my product highly accessible to hybrid/paper scrapbookers, I offer patterns in a variety of sizes and sticker sheets that are easy to print.
Haha, since I started designing digital scrapbooking product at the birth of the hobby, my style has definitely changed with the overarching style of digital scrapbooking as well, but I think there’s room for all styles in the industry and I’m glad I’ve found my niche!
Where do you find inspiration for a new kit or template?
Oh gosh. Normally a color palette or concept will come to me first. Since i do one big collection a month, I like all my themes to be pretty universal and useable for a lot of people (and myself!) For example, my Ex Libris collection started with a “reading is magical” concept, so I combined classic literary illustrations with magical and cosmic ones for a truly unique reading kit!
Do you use your own art in your kits? Show us some of your favorite original illustrations.
I only use my own art and patterns in my collections, which is why I only make one a month! Often, my digital work eventually gets turned into paper lines down the line, so everything has to be original, and really, I prefer the heart of the kit (pattern and illustration) to be my own heart.
Favorite illustrations? Ha, we’re going to have to narrow it down to the last year, I think!
I really love the illustrations I drew for the Haunting and Smitten lines this year (I turned Smitten into a paper line!) but the illustrations in the Fierce collection are close to my heart as well, even though they’re more word-based. Word art is one of my true loves!
Haunting Stickers:
Smitten Stickers:
Fierce Stickers:
What is your Enneagram number and how do you see it play out in your life?
I am an Enneagram 8, defender of the marginalized, assertive, the challenger. I am an 8 to the core and it pretty much controls my whole life – ha! But I think it served me well starting a business from nothing at age 19. I’m also not afraid to break the mold, push the boundaries and reinvent myself. I took a long break from digital between 2017-2019 and when I came back, I had to re-invent what I was doing to make it work for how my style and customer base had changed – and I hit the ground running!
If you could go on a date but only had $25 to spend, where would you go?
A HIKE! I loooooooooove being out in the woods (and East Tennessee is actually gorgeous!) I would buy some cheese and hike out to a waterfall and eat at the top of the falls! My husband and I actually do this often! This photo is linked to an Instagram reel of the falls:
When you were a child, what did you want to be when you grew up?
As a small child, I wanted to be a vet, like a lot of little girls I think, but then I realized I’d have to see hurt animals, so I’ve resorted to just having 2 cats and 2 dogs now as an adult. When I was truly planning my life as a teenager though, I desperately wanted to be a photo-journalist. The thought of traveling the world and capturing images of important things literally through my lens was amazing to me. So I guess documenting my family and making a whole career out of that falls in line with photo-journalism pretty well!
Social Media Platforms
Traci has a very active blog and Instagram. These links are just a few of the videos of Traci’s products in action:
Digital Glitter and Neon signs
Check out this behind the scenes video of Traci creating:
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CoXZCbDvpuh/?igsh=cmpreWQ0eHNtNzZ6
Testimonials from Traci’s team on why they love her goodies:
“Traci’s collections give you a huge amount for the cost of them. They just have everything you could possibly need. Her illustrations are always unique and adorable, and you often get so many different styles of them. It is so easy to mix her different collections together because her design style is so cohesive.” – Trish (team member since 2011)
“Working with Traci’s collections is a delight! She designs with intent and the options within each kit are versatile and easy to create a multitude of projects with, both hybrid and digital.” – Raechelle (team member since 2023)
“I love working with Traci’s collections because she’s a digital AND paper crafter, so she knows how to make the most of hybrid printables— while also making amazing collections that you can go back and forth between digital and printable! Plus.. have you seen her designs?! Absolutely stunning and the collections I reach for over and over again.” Allie (team member since 2020)
“I love working with Traci’s collections because she just knows how to tap into what we as crafters really love to use. Every collection is a perfect balance of papers, colours, icons and sentiments. It’s never a challenge to create with anything she releases.” Ronelia (team member since 2023)
“I love working with Traci’s collections because her designs are beautiful and very versatile. Her kits always have something to create with for digital and paper scrapbookers alike.” – Donna (team member since 2023)
“I have loved Traci’s designs for many years. Her collections have some thing for everyone no matter your style. Each collection is huge, but you have options depending on your memory keeping preferences. I like to change things constantly so sometimes I only scrap digitally and sometimes hybrid. Traci’s collections are joy to work with.” – Luly (team member since 2023)
Last words from Traci:
I have a super active blog where we have articles and tutorials nearly every other day. Here’s a blog post roundup for November 2023.
Speaking of tutorials, you should really follow me on Instagram for all the hybrid pro tips, like these two:
Before you go, check out these great pages that the SugarBabes have made with Traci’s Featured Designer kit, Hygge Winter.
That’s it for today – make sure to come back next Friday to see which 15 products Traci has chosen for her Featured Designer 15 sale. Until then, keep on scrapping!
