We all know Stacy Julian as the founding editor of the scrapbooking magazine Simple Scrapbooks. In that role, her mottos have always been "You don't have to scrapbook all of your pictures" and Simple scrapbooking is OKAY!" This message has relieved the "gotta do them all" pressure for many of us, and allowed us to get back to enjoying this wonderful hobby. In her new book, The Big Picture, Stacy takes that thought to new heights, while sharing with us her idea of scrapbooking with the world. As she says in her introduction,  "The Big Picture is ultimately my approach to scrapbooking. It's what I do, why I do it and how it's altered my outlook and enhanced my perspective."

So, what is this "big picture" that Stacy is talking about? It's the idea of looking beyond the photos, to the memories that caused them. But more than that, it's the idea that maybe we should be starting with the memories, and then find the illustrations (pictures) to tell the story. The "big picture" is also the idea of getting beyond worry of what albums you should or shouldn't make, or whether you have to make the same page for each of your children. It's instead, dwelling again on the memory, and building a system that simplifies the way you share your pages. But most importantly, according to Stacy, in The Big Picture she encourages her readers to think about their creativity differently. To open up our eyes, and look at things through the eyes of a child again. To experience the uniqueness of our lives, the simple, ordinary parts of our lives, and to learn to treasure those little things, just as much, if not more, than we treasure the big occasions.

In The Big Picture, Stacy has created a unique way to help us along on our journey of discovery. She has included tags, big tags, on which we are to make notes and lists on such topics as people, spirituality, food, accomplishments and more. These notes will then be our triggers for layouts, and in the book, she shows us how her notes triggered her memories, and brought her to the point of creating meaningful scrapbook pages. Along the way, we get to enjoy her quirky sense of humor, get to know her and her family better, and she shows us her organization systems, both in her studio as well as with her albums. She tells us not only about her pages, but about theme albums, big and small, how she's thinking about storing them, and even gives us glimpses of how she corrects mistakes on her layouts.  And while she's doing all of this, she reassures us again and again that it's okay not to scrap all of our photos, and it's okay not to scrapbook chronologically, and most importantly that it's so important to cultivate creativity in our lives.

If you don't buy any other scrapbooking "idea" book this year but this one, you'll be totally happy with your choice. This book is so much more than an idea book. It is a way to really get to the core of why we scrapbook, and change the way we think about ourselves and the world around us. That's a big claim for a scrapbook idea book, isn't it! But with this one, it's true. I encourage everyone to buy this book. You won't be sorry!