Hello! This is Stacy Julian for Big Picture Scrapbooking. I am feeling pretty cool to be honest with you, to be in the company of Wendy, Allison and Cathy. These women are truly experts and, even better, I am lucky to say they are my friends. I have personally learned so much from them, both relating to scrapbooking, and, even better and more importantly, relating to life. I love them, and I'm thrilled that we are bringing them to you in 2008.

So, here's the deal. I get to be the "fun" expert…imagine that! As I have studied and read up on fun and fun's closest cousins, happiness and creativity, I have learned that we, as scrapbookers, are perfectly poised to experience creativity, happiness and fun, in our everyday lives on an ongoing basis. Seriously, I do not believe there is another hobby anywhere that provides the kind of playful expression, personal reflection and fun stuff…colorful, inspiring tools that we have at our disposal. But I will stand by what I have said in the past, and that is that many of us are making this hobby too hard, and so I am thrilled to be the "fun" expert. I'm thrilled to spend time with you in the months of July, August and September, to help you take off the blinders and to be and have more fun with your scrapbooking.

Okay, so I have read and re-read a book over the last year or so. It's a book on creativity. It's called Thinker Toys, so it's a play on the Tinker Toys idea, and I'm going to read you a cool excerpt from it. It goes like this:

Creative people are joyful and positive. Creators look at what is and what can be instead of what is not. Instead of excluding possibilities, creators include all possibilities, both the real and imagined. They choose to interpret their own world and do not rely upon the interpretations of others, and, most importantly, creators are creative because they believe they are creative.

This is the kicker. This was the next sentence:

Most people presume that our attitudes affect our behavior, and this is true, but it is also true that our behavior determines our attitudes.

So, in my third quarter workshop we are going to behave like fun, creative, happy people. In July, we are going to dive into one of the most liberating and productive methods of scrapbooking I know. It is something that I call photo album scrapbooking, and it is going to push you past any old-fashioned paradigms that are no longer working for you into the vast and wide open spaces of productivity that you have perhaps only imagined. You and I are going to scrapbook hundreds of pictures. And you know how you feel when you meet a deadline or you finish a project, or you accomplish something that you've been working toward for a long time, you feel light and free and energized. I always feel like skipping, but in any case, this is how you will feel at the end of our first month together, and we will take that feeling and the resulting confidence, and we will march straight into August which is dedicated to the art of trying new things, otherwise known at "play".

You will get to receive from me three e-mails a week, one on Fun-day Monday, one on Wacky-Wednesday, and one on Freedom-Friday, and I'll give you more information about that, obviously, a little down the road. Probably the most exciting thing about August is the fact that I will share with you interviews and inspiration and instruction on four projects designed by four guest instructors who will be announced, not yet, but four people that I admire greatly for their artistic playfulness. I will share these instructors and their abilities with you in some very cool push-the-envelope type projects. So, I'm totally loving August…totally loving August. We will wind down the summer with a full month of daily e-mails as we work together on a real-time theme album called 30 Days Hath September. This is a concept that I shared in my book, The Big Picture. There was a project called May Everyday, and I have been dying to do it again. It is probably my favorite album ever. It will help you be totally authentic and will help you realize how fast life changes and how much there is to glean from just your everyday routine. It will amaze you. I guarantee it will become one of your most treasured scrapbooks.

I guess that's it. I want to close by saying how truly excited I am to be a part of this groundbreaking yearlong workshop. I am thrilled once again to spend time with the on-line community of like-minded people that I so enjoy. I'm going to read you one more excerpt from Thinker Toys. It is on choices, and it goes like this:

We do not choose to be born. We do not choose our parents. We do not choose our historical epoc, nor do we choose the country of our birth or the immediate circumstances of our upbringing. We do not, most of us, choose to die, nor do we choose the time or conditions of our death, but within this realm of choicelessness, we do choose how we shall live, with purpose or adrift, with joy or with joylessness, with hope or with despair, with humor or with sadness, with a positive outlook or a negative outlook, with pride or with shame, with inspiration or with defeat, and with honor or with dishonor. We decide what makes us significant or insignificant. We decide to be creative or to be indifferent. No matter how indifferent the universe may be to our choices or decisions, these choices and decisions are ours to make, we decide, we chose. In the end, our own creativity is decided by what we choose to do, or what we refuse to do, and as we decide and choose, so are our destinies formed.

Okay, I love that. I just want to say to you that I am ready to choose to be a part of this workshop, and I'm going to encourage you to choose to let go and to have more fun! Okay, that's it. This is big! Talk to you later.