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!