Sweet Shoppe Designs – The Sweetest Digital Scrapbooking Site on the Web

Hey everyone, Sweet Talk is back for 2024 with a slightly new format but the same awesome goal. Getting to know YOU, our amazing community members. Once a month we will indulge in some “sweet talk” and have some fun getting to know you all a little bit better.

“Getting to know a diverse group of people leads to a better understanding of yourself.” — Alexander Den Heijer

Without further ado let’s dive into this month’s Sweet Talk interview with an amazing community member: bcgal00

Welcome to Sweet Talk, give us a short introduction of yourself/family and how you found digital scrapbooking.

Being married for over 25 years, raising a family on the west coast of BC Canada, working at home, and enjoying the outdoors with my camera and dogs, has been a fulfilling life. My husband and I are homebodies, enjoying Netflix binging and hanging out with friends, family and our two dogs, a mini labradoodle and mini aussie. We took an early retirement, my youngest daughter joined us, and we moved to a new city. A year later we moved again and now reside in Alberta, Canada. When not busy with new friends (game nights, pickleball, cribbage tournaments, weekly Mexican Train get-togethers), I have been out exploring a lot, enjoying wildlife and landscape photography (with my beloved Sony A7Riv). My husband and I been traveling more now that we don’t work, most recently we went to South America. I travel with a Sony RX10iv and Nikon P950.

My introduction to scrapbooking was through a neighbor, about 17 years ago, we attended some classes and I developed a love for stamps, paint and ink, creating mostly cards, tags and bookmarkers. When I heard about digital scrapping, I watched videos and tutorials, which piqued my interest enough to try it out. At the time, I was recovering from a shoulder injury so had a lot of free time to learn about it. I went back to traditional paper scrapping for a few more years, then went completely over to the digi side. After some experimenting with different styles, I discovered that I loved to cluster and layer so that really started to define my style. I haven’t been scrapping as much this last year, what with all the changes that life has brought us, but my love of the craft hasn’t diminished and lately I have been feeling the pull again to create more. That’s another thing about scrapping, you can come and go, scrap when you want or don’t want to.

Answer a few fun questions for us.

1. Give us [3] must haves for the layouts you create? My number one must have for my LOs are flowers but often include mixed media i.e. paint/stamps/overlays and buttons/flairs/brads.
2. When is your prime scrapping time? I’m a morning person, usually up around 7:00 am. After getting the dogs out, having a few cups of coffee and enjoying a book while relaxing at our breakfast nook, I am ready to go into my office and get onto the computer, always finishing up by dinnertime.
3. What is your favorite thing to snack on when scrapping? Cookies or nuts (dark chocolate covered blueberries are my current fave).
4. Go to your gallery, what is the date and title of your very first layout here at SSD? “Blooming“, August 14, 2014, was my first page at SSD. The photo was a tulip from our garden. Looking back at it makes me smile, remembering our old home.
5. Dig in your stash and show (or tell) us a kit/product from your favorite designer here at SSD and why? I can’t say who my fave designer is, I love them all here but…I am partial to all the messy goodness that Studio Basic Designs creates such as the “All Mixed and Stacked” products (I think I have 8 of them) and Studio Favorites (I’ve got 15). It’s hard to just pick one designer, so also have to say I can’t live without all of the flowers/greenery/wordart that Kristin Cronin-Barrow designs. When it comes to kits, her Not To Self series is outstanding, I have 10 of them. Val of Little Butterfly Wings creates the most amazing kits with lots of stamps, overlays and ephemera. I could list every single designer here and give a reason why they could be my fave LOL. SSD really does have the most amazing designers in all of digi-land.
6. In honor of our This or That challenge system taking its bow answer a Fast Five This-or-That: (use bold or underline)

Templates or Freestyle
Patterns or Solids
Journaling or Word Strips
Minimal or Clustered
Lots of Photos or Photoless

And of course, please share with us your favorite layouts featuring the below & tell us why you chose them:

• •a cool technique
  I don’t think I’m much of a “technique-y” kind of scrapper but maybe dimensional layers can be considered a technique. Layering above and below photos, along with dimensional shadowing I think really gives this page a “real” feel to it.
  
  
• •your favorite element(s)
  “In The Cold” is full of winter flowers/greenery and I love the bits of paint against that background paper.
  
  
  “All Your Dreams” is full of stamps and doodles and the stamped frame is just awesome!
  
  
• •your choice
  “Mad About You” pulls at my heart strings. I love this photo of my hubby and Bailey sharing a hug.
  
  

Before you go, share with us a favorite tip you’ve learned over the years: Creating clusters using a product multiple times: press the key “V” to select the move tool and then with the ALT key (windows) or OPT (mac) depressed, grab and drag an element to duplicate the layer. You can then resize, recolor, rotate and/or erase parts of the duplicate layer, giving the product a completely different look.

Thanks so much bcgal00 (Rae) it’s been so much fun learning more about you. Until next time, happy scrapping. xo Kiana