The World's Best Online Classes & Products for Digital Crafters

Hi there, and welcome to Day 2 of our week-long Birthday Bash! We have LOTS to share with you today, so sit back, grab a cold drink, don that party hat, and read on!

We hope you've been having a grand time checking out our new Community features, enjoying our all-around 20% sale, and signing up for the long-awaited and FREE Photo-Editing: Special Effects & Frame-Ups course! There has been a terrific response to the free course, but we love a great big party and we always have room for more! So if you have any more friends who want to come and join us, remember to bring them over to sign up before the registration ends on Sunday!

Awesome Announcements!

Oh Shoot! with Candice - Due to popular demand, Candice Stringham brings back her Oh Shoot! Photography Course for Beginners this summer! In this 6-week intensive, instructor-led course, Candice will help you take your camera off automatic mode and make aperture and shutter speed your fast friends! Because Candice personally comments on each of your photos during the entire course, the limited slots of her course typically sell out faster than you can blink an eye. So if you're planning to camp outside the Oh Shoot! registration door, you'll want to circle June 29th on your calendars and be there by 9:00 pm EST. (Look for the Add to Cart button that will appear at that time on the product description page, and after signing up successfully, you can wait for the class to start on July 13th!)

Get Organized with Picasa! - Molly Schneider launches our newest class in digital image organization, and it's 20% off this week! This class will teach you how to use Picasa, a FREE program by Google Labs (mmm, gotta love Google).  Learn how to go beyond using Picasa as an image browser and how to use it to create tags/keywords which will help you find just what you need in your digital stash in a snap and how to organize your image files and folders! 

Spraground Community Tip for the Day

If you've explored our Spraground in the past 24 hours, then you've probably discovered all the awesome improvements, and maybe even stumbled upon our newest source of glee: our very own Spraground Community!

Our Community feature now allows us to deepen even further our friendships on the Spraground! Now we can learn about each other, check out friends' posts, and even consolidate shared items (think blogs, Twitter posts, videos, the works!)  onto our Spraground profiles.

And there's more! We now can create and join groups, and this is one of Jessica's favorite features, so it should come as no surprise that it's the feature of her Community Tip for the Day!

If the hat fits...

We have had so much fun checking out your birthday hats and your Birth-Day 1 / June CAD Day22 Challenge layouts! 

This one was a total thrill to find in our gallery (Isn't it just totally awesome to see our beloved Jes in her birthday hat? Love it!)

And here are more of lovely birthday-hat-sporting ladies that we spotted in our Challenge Gallery!

 JulanneW brought the ice cream:

and bab2000 brought her camera!

 CheriAnn brought the flowers:

SchoolMommy brought a gift!

And PattiH05k declares this the best hat she has ever worn!

And Molly dances along to the birthday beat here:

PS. She really does nod her head! Check out the moving version in our Challenge Gallery!

And if you haven't made your birthday hat yet, come join the fun! You'll find lots of digi schtuff to use on your birthday hats in our shop, too!

Molly used our newest designer sweet Crystal's papers, which you can find HERE. And she also used my T-stickies: 100% labels, which you can find HERE. And while you're in the shop, you will definitely not want to miss out on Jessica's uber-fabulous templates HERE.

Celebrating the Challenge!

In answer to Jessica's Birth-Day1 / June CAD-Day 22 challenge, we were totally thrilled to find all your terrific layouts in our Challenge Gallery! Here are some of them:

 juliaspencer14 talks about how she is enjoying her dive into the Dark Side:

and Dewnie traces her journey through all the Spraground courses here:

 pebbles_girl proudly calls herself a digital nerd (yep, we love it!):

and tammycirceo toasts her 2-year digital journey here:

 petey111 takes a trip down her digital path here:

and Scrappychick celebrates her digital adventure here:

Get your eye-candy fix and view more of these seriously awesome birthday-hat photos and super-creative challenge layouts in our Challenge Gallery!

And speaking of challenges...

Here's our Birth-Day 2 / June CAD-Day 23 Challenge!

We all love how templates help us preserve our memories, don't we? Well, today we're going to celebrate with a template challenge! YAY!

Here's the template that I've created for our challenge:

And here's my sample layout, featuring my dear niece Bea (who's also a Spraground babe when she's not in school, heehee):

And here are our very simple challenge requirements for today:

1. Create a layout using only one photo and the template I've made for you.
2. Upload your layout to our Challenge Gallery, and then post on the Challenge Thread in our General Forum sticky area to let us know when we can run over and leave you love!

And let's not forget the freebie!

Today's freebie comes to you together with the challenge!

Together with the 12x12 fully-layered .psd template, you'll be getting these other items: a highly-textured, grungy and subtly-patterned paper, a large photo frame in two versions (with and without shadow), a grungy overlay, and two circle chipboard accents.

Click on the image above to download today's freebie, which is also the template that you'll use if you choose to participate in today's challenge! (Download to your heart's delight until 10am EST tomorrow, when this freebie retires to the shop and a new one comes up! Yay!)

We hope you'll have fun with the challenge and explore our site some more! We've got enough cake and ice cream to go around! And we've got even more birthday fun stuff for you coming tomorrow!

Have a wonderful day!

Hi There!

Our long-awaited Birthday Bash is here! We're pushing this party to an ENTIRE WEEK LONG so we can get all the celebrating in that we can. It's a proud time for us, being two. It's incredible to look back and see how far we have come, in two years. We have become a real force - the premier destination for digital crafting education.  But more than that, we have become a community - a gathering of like-minded friends, helping and supporting each other. That's the magic of this place, and it's a thing that can't have been done without YOU.

So this week, we'll look back, and celebrate OUR achievements. I challenge you to look back at your own progress - maybe open the very first digital scrapbook page you ever made, or look back at some of your photos from a few years ago before you knew what you were doing. And then celebrate that you've come on this journey, and we'll all celebrate with you.

And this week, we'll also look ahead! There is so much we've got planned, to help you as you learn your craft, tell your stories, and celebrate the events in your life, big and small. 

Here's a summary of what's happening this week, and then I'll get down to today's specifics.

New Site Features

We are launching several brand-new site features this week. I'll sum up:

• Free Registration for Photo Editing: Frame-ups and Special Effects - Just log in to your account (or create one), then click here and enter the code: FREECLASS062009 to be automatically registered! Then check out the class introduction in your My Classes link in the main menu. PLEASE pass this along to everyone - registration is free through June 28, and class begins July 6!
• SITE-WIDE SALE! Through June 28, take 20% off of everything in the store. Self-paced classes, templates, products, EVERYTHING. Check out the brand new products, and hum "happy birthday" while you shop!
• New Community - Welcome to our brand-new JessicaSprague.com community! We are so excited to be able to deepen our friendships here. We'll be able to learn more about each other, consolidate shared items (like your blog, your Twitter posts, videos) onto your JessicaSprague.com profile, check out your friends' posts, create and join groups, and SO much more. Click on Community in the main menu to explore, and I'll be checking in throughout the week with tips and how-tos!
• Enhanced forums - Our long-awaited forum upgrade is here! Click Forums in the main menu to take a look, and be sure to check out the advanced search!
• New products, and new designers - Oh yeah, we are so excited to be moving forward offering lots of new digital product. Check out beautiful new goodies from Crystal Wilkerson, and be sure to check back through the week for additions by Liv Esteban and Sarah Champion/Candice Stringham. :)

Daily Goodness

Ok, and now for the stuff happening EVERY DAY of our Birthday Bash!

• Daily Challenge - Join us in the General Forum for the final week of the "Create-a-Day" challenge, hosted by Liv Esteban!
• Daily FREEBIE! - Heck YES. We love ya. And we love giving away free stuff. Drop by every day for a new free item, available for only 24 hours!
•  Daily Email - this is your signal to come and check out the day's challenge and grab the daily freebie (join the email list on the home page), and be sure to check out the Community Tip for the day to make your experience here richer!