Hi, this is Karen Grunberg with Big Picture Scrapbooking. Today I wanted to tell you a little bit about my new class, Book of Stories.

This is a process-based class, and basically it helps you collect, organize, store, and use your stories. This class is for those of you who always complain that you don't know what to journal about, for those of you who have lots and lots of stories to tell but don't really know how to organize them properly so that you can find them when you need them, for those of you who wish you could journal more but actually don't, and for those of you who have lots and lots of generic photos that you don't really know what stories to match up with.

This class, I'm hoping, applies to everybody. One of the most common complaints I hear is that people want to journal more on their pages but they don't really know what story to tell. They don't know where to come up with a story idea or when they are finished putting together their layout their story just does not seem to go with what they've already done. I want to make sure that you have lots and lots of systems that work with your specific personal scrapping style that allows you to always put a story on your pages, whether you decide the story first or after, whether it's a lot of journaling or a little, whether it's a recent story or not, whether you scrapbook chronologically or not, I want you to be able to have stories at hand so that you can always use them, and I want these stories not to be generic. I don't want them to be a list of prompts. I want them to be your stories of things that have happened in your life. I want to help you come up with systems and how you come up with story ideas, where they came from, what kind of strategies and exercises you can do so that you can jog your memory and help yourself come up with stories. Then I want to help you figure out what details you care about in a story. I want to figure out how you organize your stories so that when the time comes to put your layouts together they match with your layouts, they match with your organization system that you already have for your albums. I want to make sure that these stories are easily accessible to you, and I want to make sure they excite you and all the details you need to jog your memory to tell the story just right are there and available to you. My goal is for you to end up with a custom system that works for you, for how you scrap, for how you live, for what your family is, and for the kind of scrapbook pages that you like to create.

I want to be clear that this is a process-based class. The goal of this class is for you to come up with a process that allows you to track your stories so that you can use them when the time comes, so that when you have new stories you can add to your system and have them always available and accessible to you. We will have a project in this class. I have done one for my process. Depending on how you decide your process is, your project may or may not include a paper project. It may be a mini book, it may be a bunch of layouts, it may be a little catalogue or it may be completely on the computer, it really depends on what you decide works best for you. I don't want to force you to do it a certain way because my goal is for you to come out of this class with a process that will work for you for the rest of your life. I also want you to have a long list of ideas so that if you do need to adjust your process as your scrapbooking evolves or changes, you have all the tools you need to get to that place.

I think stories are very important, and I think storytelling on your scrapbook pages is really important. I think years later stories are one of the things we cherish most on our layout, more than our paper, more than our products, I think we cherish the stories, the details, the reasons behind our pages, and I want to help you get there. I want to help you collect all your stories and use them and put them on your scrapbook pages because I promise you that years from now or even next week you will cherish having them there.

I hope you decide to join me on this class and I look forward to seeing you there. If you have any questions, feel free to always email me. Have a great day.