First painting of 2014

I don't know how many of you have seen the "joy jar" project on Pinterest but it's a very neat idea. You take slips of paper and write down fun or exciting things that happen during the year and put them in the jar. On New Year's Eve we took all our papers out of the jar and read them. It was a great review for the year and set a positive tone for 2014.

Once we were finished, we realized that we wanted to do this project again for 2014; but what should we do with our 2013 papers? It didn't seem right to simply throw them out, but I didn't want more papers cluttering up our house (I have more than enough already). So, I decided to make a year in review painting. I drew out 2013 in the center and then divided up the canvas into sections that matched the number of papers we had. Then we picked out our colors and painted the sections. Once that was dry we took Sharpies and wrote in our information.  I thought the project turned out great and it didn't take long to do at all. I still threw away all those slips of paper but we have our memories of the year intact.