Happy New Year Everyone!

After my champagne induced reflective post yesterday about yesteryear, I am so ready for a new year! After all, since I’m not really a fan of “resolutions,” I tend to seize new months and new years as time for new projects!

What exactly is “Project 20-12?” It’s a brainchild of mine a few days old, drawing from “try a new thing every day” months or weeks that man-go-round and I have experimented with in the past. While its been a lot of fun, it can be daunting to do a new thing EVERY day for a year.

But what about knocking off 20 different activities from 12 categories in the next year? That’s roughly 5 days a week, more or less (I didn’t crunch any actually numbers there), and flexible for all sorts of actions. Some days might have several numbers checked off, some will have none. Its a work in progress.

Here’s the categories:

1.  Food: trying a new food together, making a recipe, visiting a restaurant
2. Social: reaching out to long lost friends/ family, writing letters, meeting neighbors, etc.
3. Love/ Relationship: leaving notes, doing caring things for each other
4. Places: travel, going to a new shop, new spaces near or far
5. Health/Body: trying new forms of exercise, going on walks
6. Arts/Crafts/Writing: projects together, building things, writing
7. Tech/photo/web: photo walks, blog together, create server
8. Service: for friends, strangers, communities
9. Spiritual: sharing and exploring the “deep stuff”
10. Culture: New forms of media- plays, music, movies, sports performances
11. Learning: Exploring/learning together, sharing new knowledge with each other
12. Play! (The most important one)…dancing, making up silly songs, gaming, and laughing until we cry.

But then, what are the color codes all about? Well, in true craft nerd form, I decided I wanted to make an arts and crafts project to symbolize all of this craziness. Thus, we start with a blank canvas:

…and some multicolored scraps from magazines/ ticket stubs/ product labels/ fabrics…

…and little by little, a mosaic collage symbolizing the project will be created!

I’ll do updates periodically to show you guys what the collage is looking like, and what kinds of fun new stuff we’ve been trying. Most likely, it will become a Sunday/ weekend feature.

What kinds of projects or goals do you have set for 2012? What are you optimistic about in the upcoming New Year?

Meri