Happy Friday Sweet Shoppers! Can you believe it’s already the end of May? Only a month left of school for my kiddos – and what a busy month it’s set to be, with field trips galore for the little and exams for the high schooler. I can’t wait to see what photos we can capture to scrapbook after!

Today we debut a new Featured Designer, Cindy Schneider. Cindy is a master at creating templates for every season and event in your life, but also for those everyday moments and photos. Many of my own favourite pages, and others I see in the gallery, were created with a Cindy Schneider template as a starting point, and I love how her style works with every type of kit from traditional to artsy. Her creativity knows no boundaries, I don’t know how she thinks up all her great ideas but I’m sure glad she does!

With a new Featured Designer is a new Featured Designer product, which will automatically add to your cart for FREE with any $10 purchase in the Shoppe between now and when the new releases go live on June 14th. I love the theme that Cindy chose to go with the Adventure X series, it can be used for anything from pages with your significant other to now and then pictures with your family, and snapshots of whoever your ‘us’ is.

Now let’s find out more about Cindy and her answers to our Adventure X series questions.

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?

I started digital scrapbooking in 2006 shortly after the birth of my son.  I had been doing traditional scrapbooking on and off since 1998, with the main subject of my pages being my Jack Russell named Shelby.  However, it became harder and harder to find the time to do it with little kids around, so I switched to digital and never looked back.  Once I began posting my layouts in several galleries online, I joined various creative teams including Peppermint Creative (where I was first asked to create templates from my layouts) and the Sweet Shoppe in 2007!  Eventually I became a template designer for the Sweet Shoppe in March 2010, more than 14 years ago….so crazy! 

How do you define your style? What does that style include? How has your style changed over the years? 

I’m not sure there is a name for my style, but I definitely love many layers, some embellishment clusters and having the photos be the star of the layout.   I love creating templates with lots of photos, my favorite being my photo palooza series, and they seem to be popular with customers as well!  I’ve stayed pretty true to my style over the years but tweak it slightly based on how customers respond.  I definitely create more themed templates than I used to, and I also love to do word art such as my stickers and stamps, and that’s the ticket products, as well as including title work on a lot of my templates.

Show us a preview for one of your first kits, compared to a recent kit you’re proud of. We want to see how far you’ve come! 

 One of my first template sets I sold at the Sweet Shoppe:

My most recent template set:

What’s your most memorable childhood adventure?

We didn’t take a lot of family vacations when I was a kid, but one summer we took a motorhome (my dad used to work for a company the built them), and traveled with my cousins and their family from Kelowna, B.C. up to the Yukon with lots of stops along the way.  It was definitely memorable and lots of fun!

Would you rather go on a relaxing vacation or an adventure hike?

I’d absolutely take the relaxing vacation.  My husband and I just went to Punta Cana in the Dominican Republic in April (with no kids) and it was heavenly! 😀  The view from our room:

If you had an hour to yourself, but were not allowed to use it to scrapbook or design, what would you spend the hour doing?

I would probably be taking our dog Lexi for a walk, doing pilates or reading!

What’s the last really great book you read or tv show you watched?

This is hard to choose, so I will do 2!  The Women by Kristin Hannah and Just for the Summer by Abby Jimenez

Check out these gorgeous pages from the Sugarbabes using the Featured Designer set Adventures with You. Remember, this set is FREE with any $10 purchase between now and when the new releases go live on June 14th.

That’s it for today – check back next Friday for a sneak peek of the 15 products Cindy has chosen to put on sale for her Featured Designer 15 sale that starts June 11th. Until then, keep on scrapping!