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Dear Friends,

The Restoration Project team has been very busy these last nine months, and we'd all like to take a minute to thank each one of you for your support of our first album! What a blessing it has been to have friends supporting us and believing in the work that we are doing. And yes, we do believe we are doing work worth doing.

Thanks for your support,

Jay Mathes

• We just ordered more CD's! Our new CD's feature eco-friendly packaging.
• ResProj was interviewed on WETN Radio in April. Listen to it on resproj.com!
• We're lining up concerts for the fall. Invite us to your city or school!
• We're $150 away from beginning "album #2", help us raise the money.

Since the release of our self-titled album on April 6th, 2008, we have sold 121 copies of the album, including digital downloads. Of the 200 copies which we first printed, only two remain today! Last week I put in an order to have an additional 50 copies printed.

Additionally, from the start, it has been a desire of ours to make our products as environmentally-friendly as possible - not because it is trendy (though it is), but because as Christians, we feel we have a responsibility (at least in some, small way) to be good stewards of God's creation.

With this commitment in mind, our second run of CD's will feature compostable, recyclable, repulpable packaging made from corn. The sleeves are made by UniVenture, and use EarthFirst's Ingeo PLA film. That said, we don't believe this to be the "end-all" solution, but we do feel we're moving in the right direction.

A couple other really exciting pieces of news: In late April, Paige Winfield was interviewed by Joy Curry at WETN, for her radio program "Joy in the Morning." WETN 88.1 FM, as most of you know, is the radio station for Wheaton College. Paige did a great job, and the exposure was priceless. You can listen to an MP3 of the interview directly, here: http://resproj.com/musicplayer/resproj_on_wetn.mp3

Also, one of our online distributors, CDBaby.com, has pulled all the right strings to get Restoration Project on iTunes! Here's a link to our iTunes page. If you click it, iTunes will automatically open, if you have it installed on your computer:

http://phobos.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewAlbum?playListId=279091841.

(Yeah, I know the link is long.)

The short answer: yes! The big questions: when and where? All of that to be determined. But if you want us to perform at your church, in your community, for your youth group, or whatever, just let us know! We're really working towards hitting the road this fall - even if it's just a few of us together for each concert. And if you have any suggestions for where we should try to play, let us know that, too! Email us here: resproj@jaymathes.com.

We're only about $150 away from reaching our target fundraising goal for beginning work on our next album! Way back when, before we began recording for the first album, we settled on having $1,000 in the bank before we began the process of recording another. We're so close!

The order page on our website is set up to take secure, online donations using PayPal, and, at this time, we're asking you think and pray about giving us money. It's tax deductable, too, and every little bit helps. If you donate and need us to provide you with a receipt, email us here: resproj@jaymathes.com.

Many of you probably know this from our website, so I'll only briefly mention this here. (You can go here to read more about it: http://resproj.com/donate.html .) Our overall fundraising goal for "album #2" is $6,500. That's the amount of money we feel we need to really raise the bar from our first album.

So many people have dedicated and donated tons of hours to the project, and even more hours will be needed to make the next one even better. This money will go towards paying for studio time, hiring a mix engineer, hiring a producer, pressing CD's, web design, graphic design, promotion, and a number of other things that it takes to record and release an album.

Please consider making a large donation to cover these essential costs. Though we are resolved to begin the recording process with $1,000, "album #2" will most certainly not be completed without generous donations to bring us to our $6,500 goal.

If you can't give, that's cool. Please continue to support us by sharing our music and vision with your friends and family. We'll even give you flyers and postcards to give to people! Let us know.

And so we conclude our first-ever quarterly newsletter. We thank God for the blessing of music, for giving us musical talents as he has been gracious to supply, and for the early success of a new ministry. May we lift our hearts in song, with thanksgiving to the Lord, to whom we owe our very selves. May all glory go to God alone.